The expatriate American artist Benjamin West was a prolific painter of historical scenes and a tireless draftsman, but seldom did he lavish such care on a drawing as he has here. For West, the work is also unusual for its allegorical theme, Caritas (Charity) or Maternal Love. The brief fashion for such subject matter in the late eighteenth century reflected the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788) on the primal role of the mother in juvenile education. West, here, appears to elaborate a related drawing of a nursing mother (British Museum, London) into a fluid and dynamic X-shaped composition that includes two older children along with the suckling youngster. In this format, the image invokes the traditional quartet of Caritas dating from the early Italian Renaissance.

The remarkable delicacy of both contour and modeling, as well as the thin paper bearing the image, suggests that West made the drawing as the basis for an engraving, though no corresponding print is known. However, West also made drawings expressly for sale; he may even have executed this image as a model for his pupils at the time, the elder daughters of England's King George III, whom West served for many years as court painter.