This etching is one of a series of drawings, charcoals, and etchings titled "Woman with Dead Child," all produced in 1903. Kollwitz began the series with works she called "Pieta"--Mary mourning her dead son. These first studies quickly evolved into a group of etchings without any theological references, simply of a woman with dead child, and called by Elizabeth Prelinger "perhaps the strongest image Kollwitz ever made." (pp. 40-42)Bonus-Jeep, who had not seen Kollwitz for some time, was confounded when she saw this etching at an exhibition. Concerned that something had happened to Kollwitz's young son Peter, she speculated, "Can something have happened with little Peter that she could make something so dreadful?" Reflecting later, she concluded that Kollwitz was "someone to whom it is given to reach beneath the ultimate veils." (Prelinger, p. 42)The subject Kollwitz focused on, the mother mourning for the dead child, is not based on any direct life experience: "Great piercing sorrows have not struck me yet" she wrote in her diary (The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1988), but she was not to escape "great piercing sorrows" much longer. Her son Peter, who at age seven posed for the dead child in this etching, was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-one and a grandson Peter was killed in World War II.Note: The quoted words of Bonus-Jeep are footnoted in Prelinger: "cited from Catherine Krahmer, Kathe Kollwitz (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981), p. 56.