Poor family.

Watercolour, vellum paper, 52 x 36 cm visible part; signed and dated "25/2/XVI" in lower part.

Framed under passe-partout (not studied outside frame).

Four members of a country family (the grandmother, the mother, a child and a baby), visibly exhausted, are asleep in the open air. A reminder of or an allusion to the numerous refugees of WWI? A. Ost (1884-1945) himself fled from Belgium to the Netherlands in 1914. In Amsterdam, he executed many works and prints in favour of charitable institutions for refugees or war prisoners.