Cow in the meadow

Cow in the Meadow from 1904, at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, places an animal in the open landscape of the North German moors near Worpswede — a setting that defined much of Modersohn-Becker's work. The cow is both a practical element of the rural economy she observed and a subject with deeper resonances in German landscape painting, where cattle in meadow had been a significant motif since the seventeenth century. Modersohn-Becker approached the animal with the same direct simplicity she brought to human subjects, stripping the subject of anecdotal or sentimental additions.

The animal is rendered with broad, simplified forms against the flat, green meadow — a composition almost abstract in its reduction to essential masses. The muted color palette and the horizontal emphasis of the composition convey the expansive flatness of the North German landscape.