Passing Mother's Grave marked one of his initial forays into Realism by depicting peasant life and set the stage for the artist's lasting fascination with the theme of fishermen.

Israëls moved to Paris in 1845 and lived there until 1847, studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the sculptor James Pradier and the painters Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche.

The work portrays a scene from the life of Dutch King William the Silent, a key leader in the 17th-century revolt against Habsburg Spain.

[7] The widower is portrayed as a fisherman and he is holding a boy's hand and carrying a baby as he passes the headstone of his deceased wife.

[1] The art historian Sheila D. Muller has written that the artist accomplishes a "monumental treatment of the commonplace" and compared its impact with that of The Stone Breakers, an 1849 painting by the French realist painter Gustave Courbet.

van Gelder called the painting a "genuinely new moment and the obvious beginning of the second period of Israëls's development", in which he moved away from his previous interests in German Romanticism and his work emulating the Renaissance and Baroque masters.

For instance, artists Johannes Heinrich Rennefeld and Willem Steelink Jr. made prints of the painting on three separate occasions, which were then published and distributed both in and beyond the Netherlands.

[7] While the work is generally considered among the most prominent and recognized paintings by Israëls, it has also met with criticism, particularly in regard to what some have seen as an overtly sentimental subject matter.

[2] Due to the work's popularity, the subject of Passing Mother's Grave has also inspired the design of a statue in honor of Israëls—The Jozef Israëls Monument—in his hometown of Groningen, which depicts the figures from this painting cast in bronze.

[19][17] In 2008 another copy of the painting, titled Passing Mother's Tomb, sold at Lempertz auction house in Cologne, Germany.