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Ernst Barlach's rare bronze sculpture "The Melon Eater" (also known as "The Melon Cutter" and "The Melon Peeler") is one of the works that the sculptor created immediately after his trip to Russia and based on the impressions he gained there. In August 1906, at a time of artistic uncertainty and lack of success, he and his brother Nikolaus set off for Kharkov in southern Russia via Warsaw. After only a few weeks, Barlach realised that in observing and drawing the Russian peasants and beggars, content and form of his vision of art coincided in an ideal way. Only now did he realise that "participation in people", as he himself wrote, was to become his great theme: "I must be able to sympathise," he wrote to his publisher friend Reinhard Piper, "and my artistic mother tongue is, after all, the human figure or the milieu in which people live, suffer, rejoice, feel and think" (quoted from: Die Ernst Barlach-Museen, Leipzig 1998, p. 46).

The impressions of this journey are directly expressed in works such as "The Beggar Woman", "The Sitting Woman" and the "The Melon Eater" of 1907. In contrast to previous works, such as the naturalistic "Cabbage picker" (1894), the sculptural form was now bundled and concentrated, and the robed figure became an expression of Barlach's inner feelings. In the "Melon Eater", the elementary activity is captured in the sculptural formula of a rising diagonal. Almost all the lines, the upper body, the right leg and the seams of the robe, strive in this direction and give the figure unity, but also dynamism and strength.