Mother with Dead Child

In 1910 Kollwitz began exploring the theme of motherhood and death in a series of heart-rending studies of a woman and her dead child. The final image, an etching with the title Death, Woman and Child from 1911, depicts a woman desperately holding on to her lifeless child as the bony arm of Death comes to snatch him away. In this preparatory drawing, Kollwitz leaves out the skeletal hand and the struggle for the child's body to focus instead on the woman's loving embrace of her child. Kollwitz's ability to express extremes of emotion and pathos is clear in this powerful drawing, which makes allusions to a Christian Piéta, a devotional image of the dead Christ on Mary's lap.