Mackensen sprang to fame from poor beginnings after his painting Church Service in the Open Air won Germany's top international art prize in 1895, ahead of Manet and Corot. Mackensen worshipped Rembrandt, and an obvious line back through early van Gogh links him to François Millet, that wonderful religiously-imbued French painter of peasant life. The artists' village in Barbizon founded by Millet was, alongside the influence from Morris, another inspiration for Worpswede. 

Mackensen's own style was a religious realism of the soil. In The Ploughshare, a vast, Dutch-hued oil painting of two women hauling a plough, a devout blind man scatters the seed behind. Elsewhere a craftsman fashions clogs as dusk descends on the moor, while in the famous Madonna of the Moor a massively drawn young mother hushes her child. 

The sparse land with its grid of narrow canals, occasionally punctuated by thin birch trees and sailing barges carrying the peat that was the only means of local livelihood — all the Worpswede painters painted this intense, sky-filled Low German landscape. Perhaps among the traditionalists none was better than Hans am Ende, of whom Rilke said the result was music. With Fritz Overbeck the mood became more overtly expressive. The Weyberg hill, beneath which the village sheltered, inspired Paula Becker to go still further and turn fields and farmhouses into blocks of abstracted colour.  

Mackensen resisted all that was modern. If the faintest touch of the new hovers over his post-van Gogh The Sower, it must have crept in during a weak moment. The Modersohns called Mackensen and am Ende the "painter-officers" because of their patriotic conservatism, and the personalities clashed. Mackensen, mean-minded, envious and boastful, objected to Modersohn painting his wife naked in the garden. When Vogeler defended Modersohn there was nearly a duel. 

The rule-bound, backward-looking Mackensen, whose best work has a distant affinity with Repin, begrudged Becker and Vogeler their capacity to pass him by. He was the one Worpswede artist who did not come from a wealthy background. In the postwar upheaval he denounced the "red" Vogeler to the authorities and formed a "Stahlhelm" veterans' group to combat the socialist influence in the village. Later the steel helmet-wearers happily donned brown shirts.