Paula

This canvas is about Paula Becker-Modersohn, a German painter who lived from 1876 to 1907. Born in Dresden, she soon came to Bremen and then to the artists´ colony in Worpswede in 1898. After a stay in Paris in 1900 she was married to Otto Modersohn in 1901. She left him in 1906 to live in Paris again but returned in 1907 and got pregnant. Her daughter was born on November 2nd, and she died 18 days later. Her friend Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his "Requiem for a friend" for her after her death which contains the lines I´ve quoted here:
"We have, indeed, when we love, only this one thing:/ to loose one another: because holding on to ourselves/ comes easily to us, and does not first have to be learned." (Translation by A. S. Kline)