Egon Schiele

Margarete Weiss von Trostprugg (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Switzerland (sale: Sotheby's, London, 4th April 1979, lot 232)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1998, no. 1872, illustrated p. 568

Executed on buff-coloured wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount at two points on the top edge. There is a 1cm. tear to the left of the upper edge, a small nailhead-sized loss near the upper left edge, and three further niches, two to the upper edge and one to the upper right edge. Apart from a 1.5cm. flattened crease running across the lower left corner and some faint handling creases, this work is in very good condition. Colours: The paper tone is warmer and the red tones are stronger in the original.
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The present work is one of a series of preparatory studies created for the 1918 oil of Schiele's nephew Toni that remained unfinished when the artist died. Both this study and the final portrait are typical of the trend in Schiele's late portraits where he moved away from the emotional intensity of his earlier works in favour of an objective, realistic approach. The expressive distortion and foreshortening gives way to a greater emphasis on accurate representation in the last years of his life, as indicated by the alterations to the position of the arms in this work which typify Schiele's 'old master' approach involving dozens of preparatory studies to arrive at the finished work. The palette of these later works is correspondingly more subdued, with the subtle highlights of the hair and stockings setting off the naturalistic portrayal of the child's body.

This return to classicism corresponds with a wider trend both within Schiele's own work and the Expressionist movement as a whole. The experience of World War I caused many Expressionist artists to view their indulgence of the extremes of subjective emotion as a decadent luxury. The lack of intense emotion or angst in the depiction of this rosy-cheeked, doll-like toddler suggests a certain sentimentality in these late portrayals of his nephew. Indeed, this shift in Schiele's art can be illustrated by the contrast between this humane vision of Anton Peschka and his bleak vision of 1914, in which the child is depicted as voracious, primal organism, sucking greedily at his mother's breast. However, Schiele's content was inextricably linked with his technique, and this change in the emotional register of his later works was linked with a renewed pursuit of technical mastery in his draughtsmanship. As Jane Kallir comments, 'in terms of pure technical mastery, Schiele reached the height of his powers in 1917-18. Linear perfection and painterly grace were balanced harmoniously in his late drawings and paintings. Objective precision and philosophical profundity, the personal and the universal, the naturalistic and the spiritual, coexist organically in the artist's late work' (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, Drawings & Watercolours, London, 2003, p. 448).