Egon Schiele

Galerie Würthle, Vienna
Acquired from the above by the late owner in the 1960s

Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1990, no. 1825, illustrated p. 561

Executed on cream wove paper not laid down. There are artist's pinholes to all four corners. There is a crease running vertical to the left edge, a 1cm. tear to the centre of the lower left edge and a nick to the upper left corner. There is time-staining to all four edges and a small area of discoloration to the centre of the left edge. This work is in good condition.
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Sitzende Frau, executed in 1916, is a wonderful example of Schiele's consolidation of style. Describing the artist's maturity and his concentration on the accuracy of representation in 1916, Jane Kallir remarked: 'Essentially 1916 witnesses a consolidation of tendencies nascent the previous year. The perfection of a line both spontaneous and precise results in drawings that zero in on their subjects with intense accuracy. (...) The nude no longer dominates the œuvre, and the majority of drawings are portraits. Since Schiele as portraitist has always been more down to earth and more representationally accurate than when rendering nudes, this shift tends to skew his overall orientation, presaging the almost classical that will come to dominate the œuvre in 1917 and 1918' (J. Kallir, op. cit., p. 560).  

Although the predominant absence of personal subjects is a notable feature of 1916, Edith, Schiele's wife, was by all accounts Schiele's principal model at the time and appears in a few works. The hair style and posture of the sitter in the present work bears a striking resemblance.