The painting “The Blind Mother” by Egon Schiele is a reflection of the difficult relationship of the painter with his own parent

The Blind Mother is a 1914 painting by Egon Schiele. A woman feeding a child is depicted in a strange, as if broken pose, in a dark room that looks like a closet or attic. The baby is wrapped in black and blue clothes, while the mother is completely naked.

A thin, emaciated face with sharp features and blind eyes is turned away from the child. In the background one can see the vague outlines of some massive object, resembling an open chest.

The whole picture is made in yellow-brown tones, enhancing the atmosphere of hopeless despondency. The only bright spots are the woman’s red lips, which match exactly in hue with the red stripes at the bottom of the canvas.

Name of the painting: “Blind Mother” (German: Blinde Mutter).
Author: Egon Schiele (1890-1918).
Year of writing: 1914
Size: 99 x 120 cm.
Style: Expressionism.
Genre: Portrait.
Technique: Oil.
Material: Canvas.
Location: Leopold Museum, Vienna.

Egon Schiele is a talented, extraordinary Austrian expressionist artist

During his short life, he painted about 300 paintings and more than once turned to the image of the relationship between mother and child. Egon blamed his own parent that she remarried too quickly after the death of her first husband, giving her son to be raised by her uncle, which caused him a deep moral trauma.

The artist poured out his pain in the works, one of which was the painting “The Blind Mother”. This canvas causes ambiguous feelings in the viewer. On the one hand, the author depicted a fairly common plot: a nursing woman with a baby in her arms.

On the other hand, the atmosphere of work is full of melancholy and hopelessness; there is no maternal tenderness and love in it. The heroine looks detached and devastated. She has turned away from the child, cannot and does not want to see her child. The kid, on the other hand, clings tightly with a small hand to a woman who constitutes for him the source of life and the whole world.

The painting “The Blind Mother” by Egon Schiele is a deep and tragic work, which clearly shows the connection between the child and the mother, which has become very painful and destructive for the artist.