Two sitting girls in the birch forest

Two Sitting Girls in the Birch Forest from 1904 places two young female figures in the birch woodland that was one of Modersohn-Becker's most characteristic settings. The dual figure within a landscape creates a social dimension — two girls together in the woods, companionable or lost in separate thoughts — within the natural environment that she always treated with deep seriousness. The combination of figures and specific landscape represents one of her most successful integrations of her two primary subject areas. The painting's current location is not publicly documented.

The two figures seated among the birch trees create vertical and horizontal elements that echo the tree trunks around them — an integration of figure and landscape at the formal level. The compressed space of the birch grove is conveyed through the close grouping of trunk, figure, and ground.