Egon Schiele. An early work believed to have been lost has been found
The 60 x 100 cm painting bears the signature of Egon Schiele at the bottom right and two dates: the one on the back sets the start of construction on 21 April 1907 and the one on the front the completion of 12 May 1907. The artist therefore created so that portrait just before he turned 17, at a time when he was already attending the Academy of Fine Arts and had met Gustav Klimt, who took it under his own.
The subject, however, chosen for several paintings that have come down to us, is Egon’s wealthy uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, sitting at the piano of his house in the Viennese district of Leopoldstadt. After the death of Schiele’s father at the end of 1904, the man had also become the guardian of his nephew, a function that he had then abandoned in 1910 with harsh words of blame for the young man’s behavior, accused of a careless relationship with money. .
The original frame
The painting still has its original frame, a detail that can be deduced from a black and white photograph, used as a postcard and sent on December 6, 1930, in which the painting appears on the wall of a living room. The sender was an intimate of the family, Gustav Huber, who gave the painting until his death posse, in 1945. Two preparatory sketches of that youthful work that had vanished so far were also known, one of which is kept at the Wien Museum. It was therefore assumed that that portrait had existed, but traces of it had been lost after the war, then the scene owner, when the current owner, an Austrian private individual from Gustav Huber’s family circle, approached the Leopold Museum in Vienna for an opinion.
Verena Gamper
Verena Gamper, the head of research on Schiele of the institution, thanks to the largest collection in the world of works by the Austrian expressionist, then reconstructed the provenance and certified the authenticity, subsequently confirmed by other expert reports: “Stylistically the painting presents impressionist elements .
It was exciting to see a work that was feared lost materialize ”, Gamper affirmed. A special agreement to include the painting in the articulated and evocative exhibition on Vienna around the 1900s that the Leopold Museum offers permanently. The rediscovered painting was also included in the imminent launch of a corpus of 24 works by Schiele owned by the Viennese institution, which will be proposed in the form of NFT (non-fungible tokens). The funds raised from the sale will be used for the restoration of the work and, as desired by the museum management, possibly also for its purchase.