I would like to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-six Cezannes are being shown there! - Paula Modersohn-Becker

Today I painted my first plain air portrait at the clay pit, a little blond and blue-eyed girl. The way the little thing stood in the yellow sand was simply beautiful – a bright and shimmering thing to see. It made my heart leap. Painting people is indeed more beautiful than painting a landscape. I suppose you can notice that I am dead-tired, after this long day of hard work, cant you? But inside I am so peaceful and happy..

I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity.

In the last few days I have been thinking very intensively about my art and I believe that things are progressing for me. I even think that I'm beginning to have a liaison with the sun. Not with the sun that divides everything up and puts shadows in everywhere and plucks the image into a thousand pieces, but with the sun that broods and makes things gray and heavy and combines them all in this gray heaviness so that they become one. I'm thinking about all of that very much and it lives within me besides my great love. A time has come when I think that I shall again be able to say something [in her painting] one day; I am again devout and full of expectation..