Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Becker was born in Dresden on 8 February 1876 and grew up in Bremen, where her family settled in 1888. After drawing lessons in London in 1892, a teaching diploma and a course in Berlin with the women artists' association, she moved in 1898 to the artists' colony of Worpswede, studying under Fritz Mackensen and befriending the sculptor Clara Westhoff. Her work met harsh criticism at the Bremen Kunsthalle in December 1899. On 25 May 1901 she married the painter Otto Modersohn, yet the village's traditional landscape manner never matched her ambitions, and her attention turned to Paris.

Between 1900 and 1906 she made four stays in the French capital, studying at the Académie Colarossi and looking hard at Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. She met Rainer Maria Rilke in 1900, and their friendship lasted until her death. Her figures grew simpler and heavier: peasant children, old women from the Worpswede poorhouse, mothers with infants. On 23 February 1906 she left Worpswede for Paris and painted Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), today in Bremen, generally regarded as the first nude self-portrait by a woman painter. She returned to Otto in 1907.

Her daughter Mathilde was born on 2 November 1907; Paula Modersohn-Becker died on 20 November, eighteen days later, aged 31, most probably of an embolism. She had sold very few canvases, yet left more than 700 paintings and some 1,000 drawings. In 1927 the Bremen merchant Ludwig Roselius opened a museum to her on the Böttcherstraße, presented as the first devoted to a woman painter. Her pictures rest on broad, simplified planes, thick matte paint and a muted palette of earths, greens and warm greys, qualities that an oil painter can follow stroke by stroke.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.