Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Associated with a Barbizon-like group of artists located in the small town of Worpswede, in northwest Germany, Paula Modersohn-Becker adopted an aesthetic that favored buccolic settings and scenes of everyday life. However, rather than a romanticized or sentimental vision of nature, many of her works possess a strange ambivalence. This idyllic wooded landscape has a mysterious, haunting quality, added by the mixture of dead and live trees in the Teufelsmoor, a large region of bog and swampland near Worpswede, the almost humanoid shadows in the foreground, and the loose, expressionistic rendering of the lines.

Unfortunately, Modersohn-Becker's unique vision was cut short by her untimely death at age thirty-one, one month after the birth of her first child. Her husband Otto later worked with a master printer to re-issue some of her prints, including this work and another in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art's collection (EMA 72.4.1).