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..

In a letter to her friend, the sculptress Clara Rilke-Westhoff, Worpswede, 13 May 1901; as quoted in 'Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists'; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 201