The shaded eyes with their emphasised pouches making the artist look tired and exhausted can also be seen in the charcoal self-portrait NT 988. Kollwitz herself was evidently uncertain about the year of origin of this drawing as she only dated it years later and put a question mark behind the date. But it seems that a connection to the 1924 lithograph suggested itself to her as well.
Despite the intimacy of the moment depicted here, the artist had the lithograph published as part of a portfolio for the fourth annual gift of the Kreis graphischer Künstler und Sammler by the publisher Arndt Beyer, Leipzig, 1924. Today, this is her most famous self-portrait.
