Woman with Dead Child

Woman with Dead Child is an etching completed in 1903 by the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, part of a group of studies on the theme of death for which she used herself and her young son as models, depicting a mother crouched and curled protectively around the limp body of her dead child in an attitude of raw physical anguish rather than composed grief. The image sits within Kollwitz's broader lifelong preoccupation with poverty, death and maternal suffering among Germany's working class, and has often been read in retrospect as an uncanny anticipation of the grief she would herself experience when her son Peter was killed in action in the First World War in 1914. It remains one of the most viscerally powerful images of maternal loss in the history of printmaking.