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Max Pechstein's work "The Artist's Son on the Sofa" is painted with oil colours on canvas. The painting is in landscape format and measures 120 x 90 cm. It is framed in a simple brown wooden frame.

Max Pechstein painted the picture in 1917, after he had been discharged from the army and returned to Berlin. It shows his four-year-old son Frank posing on a sofa: The boy wears a green shirt, tights and leather shoes, and has a neat haircut. His legs are slightly bent on the seat, his left arm is leaning against the back of the sofa, and his right hand is resting loosely on his right leg. With his left hand he holds the strings of a flying toy, a butterfly, which lies in front of him. The boy's eyes are shown as almond-shaped black areas; the expression is difficult to grasp, the direction of his gaze seems unclear. There is an indefinable distance between painter and model, in this case father and son. Next to the sofa, on the right-hand side of the picture, there is a wooden chest with a blue and white vase on top, the lid of which is slightly tilted.

The background of the painting is completely dominated by a mural of South Sea motifs. A crouching black figure, recognisable as a woman, is holding a bowl from which a grazing animal appears to be drinking. At the same time, the bowl appears to be submissively handed to the boy. The two levels of the image - the mural and the figure of the boy in front of it - interact, fiction and reality merge. Small crocodile-like lizards and plants scattered throughout the mural complement the background composition. The entire picture surface is painted in an earthy palette, which further supports the connection between the picture planes.

In this work, the artist brings together opposites that he himself experienced: on the one hand, he uses the mural to recall the happy time he spent in the South Seas, which was cut short after a few months by the outbreak of the First World War, and, on the other, he shows the privileged circumstances in which his son Frank grew up. The trip to the South Seas and military service separated the artist from his son in the early years of his life. A certain melancholy at having to say goodbye to the dream of life in the paradise of the South Seas and the estrangement from his child determine the effect of the picture.