From 1941 until 1944, Gedö made numerous pencil drawings at a home for the elderly. With simple graphic markings the artist builds up an arrangement of tones, depicting an interior with a woman seated by a bed. The woman has her back to the door and seems to arrange the covers on the bed opposite her. The absence of detail conveys a sense of mystery; the suggestive sensitivity of the drawing evokes the figure's interior psychological state.

Ilka Gedö was born in Budapest to a schoolteacher father (her mother was a clerk). She showed precocious skills in drawing from an early age and during 1939-1942 studied with the graphic artist Tibor Gallé and then with Viktor Erdei, a painter and graphic artist influenced by naturalist and Art Nouveau traditions. Gedö's individual style reveals an interest in fin-de-siècle Symbolism and Expressionist tendencies.