The characters of Maternal Love are carried forward with a robust and vibrant pictorial sign of chiaroscuro, crushed and elongated as the Segantinian brushstroke, differently directed to suggest the delicacy of the skin, the lightness of the clothes, the disorder of the grass in the countryside, the wind energy in the sky. In the absence of specific documents relating to the drawing, in the general catalog of Segantini drawn up in 1982 Annie-Paule Quinsac puts forward the hypothesis that it is a table intended for a children's book, as indicated by both the graphic layout and the handwritten inscription. present in the lower register Mom: the molosser growls, words that seem to be pronounced by the frightened child. A second, well-worn sentence then emerges in the upper right corner near a couple of flying birds: "Giovanni Segantini offers Giovanni Segantini October 1890 to his friend Vittorio Zippel." The finding in recent times of unpublished correspondence between the maestro from Arco and Vittorio Zippel, an irredentist from Trentino, journalist and editor only two years younger than Segantini, have allowed the exact reconstruction of the history of charcoal. It was specially created for the "Strenna Trentina Literary and Artistic" of 1891, a publication edited by Zippel himself, reproduced in photolithography accompanying the opening article "Trentino nel 1890".