The painting combines visual quotations from earlier art with allusions to Feuerbach’s own work. The female figure recalls the woman personifying earthly love in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, a copy of which by Franz Lenbach forms part of the Schack collection. Rabbits, symbols of fertility, and fading flowers, evocations of transience, suggest that the image of a mother with her children is to be understood as an allegory of life.