Father

An emaciated, bald man is shown on hands and knees, ribs and tendons visible beneath taut skin, his strained face turned toward the viewer. Astride his back sits a small nude child, one arm flung upward as if reaching for something beyond the frame. The pair crosses an otherwise empty, undefined page alone.

Fine, dense hatching models the man's wasted anatomy in warm sepia tones against toned paper, while the child is left almost unshaded, a few light contours setting its softness against the father's harrowed body. The etching's worn paper and sparse composition give the image a stark, melancholic weight of burden and endurance.