5. Käthe Kollwitz – Woman With Dead Child 1903
The artist and her younger son Peter were the models for this disturbing image of mortality, when her elder son Hans had narrowly escaped dying of diphtheria. The work has none of the resignation of her later sculpture (1937) of a mother and her dead son, ‘something like a Piéta’, of which the artist said ‘There is no longer pain, only reflection.’ In the 1903 print there is only pain, drawing upon her personal experience, observation, and brush with mortality.