Little Mother epitomizes the empathy Eberle felt toward the immigrants of the Lower East Side, Washington Square and the West Village of New York, who so inspired her work. What George Luks and Robert Henri immortalized in their portraits of the underclass, Eberle paralleled in her sculptures. Like these painters, the message that Eberle puts forward in her depiction of the Little Mother is a feeling of optimism that was shared by the Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants who were carving out their futures with hard work and determination.
The older sister is not downtrodden and evokes an admirable respect for the responsibility a sibling might have shouldered within these family units. It is a model that demonstrates Eberle’s core interest to artistically document an unheralded part of society and culture that she experienced on a day-to-day basis outside her studio. As a result a number of her subjects came from viewing the people who lived there, especially the children. She found that the children of the Lower East Side played without restraint and expressed their emotions without any inhibition. The Little Mother was conceived in 1907, the year in which Eberle moved her studio to West 9th Street near Washington Square. Eberle began an association with the Macbeth Gallery in New York and in 1909 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Roller Skater.
