Exhausted Strength

The first thing you see here is a baby asleep in a wicker cradle, its head on a white pillow, lit by the only light in the room. It takes a moment longer to notice the floor. On the bare boards beside the cradle, half swallowed by shadow, lies the child's mother, collapsed where she fell. Waldmüller painted this in 1854. The Belvedere reads it as a picture about women of his century who had to cope with a child on their own, stretched past their strength and deep in poverty. The museum finds no other painting of his so unsparing in its realism. On the table behind the baby stand a basket and a few jugs, with a white cloth hanging over the edge. The picture also carries a second, harsher title, The Dead Mother.