Woman with Dead Child

Käthe Kollwitz produced this Woman with Dead Child in 1903 as an etching. A mother crouches in darkness, clutching her child's small lifeless body. Her face presses against the child's head. Her arms wrap around the form completely, as if trying to absorb it back into herself.

Kollwitz used herself and her son Peter as models. A decade later, Peter died in World War I. She returned obsessively to themes of maternal grief and loss throughout her career. The stark black and white medium strips away everything but the central agony.

National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. holds this print. The image has become iconic of anti-war sentiment and parental anguish, reproduced on book covers and protest posters for over a century.