Portrait of a Peasant Woman (Girl with Nose) (Bildnis einer Bäuerin [Mädchen mit Nase])

1899-1902, printed 1922-1923 in Worpswede

Paula Modersohn-Becker was an innovative painter and self-portraitist of the Worpswede artist colony in northern Germany. As her unsentimental, distilled style evolved, her husband, a more traditional artist, lamented her tendency to draw figures with “hands like spoons” and “noses like cobs.” Sitting somewhere between portraiture and caricature, this etching is an introspective work that subverts the fin de siècle trope of depicting women as idealized embodiments of nature.