Starting from the way the child is held, to the position and rounded shape of the mother's head or the composition of the whole image, the work Mother with the child resumes an iconographic model often used in representations of Mary and the Christ Child.

However, the image shows only an ordinary woman from the countryside, and the maternal hypostasis is the crowning form of her femininity. Not coincidentally, the communist dissident Klein József renounces, in the spirit of dialectical materialism, the religious charge that such an image tended to have, for the sake of representing an everyday woman, on the same visual model. In this image, one mythology is replaced by another mythology.

If in the case of a Byzantine-type icon one could find stylized shapes, such as the hands of the female character, as well as large, flat, colored surfaces - mostly gold - in the case of Klein's modernist image, the shapes are more rounded and fluid, the pink color of the women's clothing stands out, and the smile of the two characters gives the work a more relaxed and playful atmosphere.