Half figure of a girl with a yellow wreath in her hair

Paula Modersohn-Becker painted this half-figure of a girl with a yellow floral wreath in her hair in 1902, during her crucial years of formation at Worpswede and in Paris. This work exemplifies her project of depicting ordinary German rural figures — particularly children and mothers — with a directness that deliberately stripped away the sentimental idealisation prevalent in contemporary genre painting. The yellow wreath crowning the girl has a folk-art simplicity that aligns with Modersohn-Becker's studied primitivism, influenced by Cézanne and Gauguin. Now in the Landesmuseum Hannover, it exemplifies the proto-Expressionist direction of her brief but remarkable career.

Modersohn-Becker reduces the figure to essential forms — the simplified oval of the face, the flat colour of the garment, the crown of yellow flowers — in a manner clearly influenced by Cézanne's structural approach. The paint surface has an earthy directness that distances the image from academic smoothness.