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 and not laid down. T-hinged to the mount in the upper two corners. The sheet is slightly time stained, and the upper and right edges are slightly unevenly cut. There is some mount staining to all four extreme edges, not visible when framed. Some minor spots of foxing to the sheet. There is a very minor crease and paper loss to the upper left corner, and a very minor paper loss to the upper right relating to a tiny pin sized hole. There are two more tiny pin holes to each of the lower corners. There is a circa 1cm vertical tear to the tip of the lady's left shoe. There are some minor creases to the sheet. There is a diagonal crease to the left edge running through the whole length of the sheet. Overall 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 this particular year, 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. Schiele met Edith and her sister Adele in Vienna: their parents apartment faced his studio. The hair style and posture of the sitter in the present work is certainly highly evocative of the fashions of the times.

Early on in his life, the radiologist Dr. C. J. Rittmannsberger developed a pronounced interest in the arts. This fascination was further enhanced by his activities as a collector and his close personal contacts with artists which subsequently inspired him to become creative as an artist himself. The aspect of modern works on paper that he particularly admired was a strong and expressive economy of line, so it is not surprising that Rittmannsberger was attracted to this particular drawing. Dr. Rittmannsberger assembled his collection of works by important artists such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Alfred Kubin as early as the 1960s and became one of the pioneering collectors of the Austrian avant-garde.