he Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln is in possession of numerous private family portraits as the Kreissparkasse Köln – the promoter and owner of the museum – acquired the core collection from the artist’s estate.
This acquisition contained a large number of drawings of her children and grandchildren. Drawings of young children, like this work, demonstrate the artist’s extraordinary skills, although only works depicting her son Hans and, above all, her eldest grandchild have been preserved.
There are several drawings in which she depicts her son Hans spontaneously. She almost exclusively focusses on the child’s head, rarely including the torso. She was obviously interested in capturing the child’s facial expression. This is supported by the different dates that Käthe Kollwitz added on some of these small-scale works. This suggests that at this stage she did not yet have a camera to document the development of her son.
