In The Young Mother, Guston presented his wife Musa McKim and daughter Musa Jane, born in Iowa City in 1943, as a secular Madonna and Child with a faint reminder of the monumentality of Social Realism. A melancholy and lonely mood permeates the interior scene. Guston's wife Musa McKim was said to have had a quality of "dreamy inwardness," which is suggested in the portrait. The assortment of earth and mineral-derived pigments—siennas, ochres, umbers, and blues—that Guston used, and the dry quality of the pigment, were also influenced by the materials and techniques of fresco mural and early Renaissance painting.

Guston said that what ultimately caused him to leave his figurative narratives of the 1940s was seeing early pictures of Nazi-death camps. It is easy to imagine how those shocking images of stacked bodies could override any potential idea for figuratively realistic composition.