Provenance:
presumably Estate Egon Schiele;
Collection Rudolf Leopold, Wien;
Swiss Collection.

Literature:
Jane Kallir. Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, London 1998, page 439, No. 802, black-and-white illustration.

Egon Schiele met his companion and model Wally Neuzil in 1911. The couple moved to his mother's birthplace in Cesky Krumlov in the spring of the same year. This was the beginning of one of Schiele's artistically most productive phases, marked by the creative and at the same excessive connection between the artist and his muse. As Jane Kallir points out, the significant aspect of the relationship with Wally was that Schiele communicated it as such to his family and patrons for the first time.¹ Free from social conventions of the time, he intensively explored the female body and depicted it in explicit, sometimes daring poses.

¹ Jane Kallir. Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, London 1998, page 111.