Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Edith Schiele

“One evening Schiele was invited with his wife. She was completely obscured by her tousled blonde hair and a shy hesitancy,” wrote a friend of the artist’s about the young couple. They had married in 1915; three years later the Expressionist artist painted his wife with a highly sensitive gaze. It would be the first of his paintings to be acquired by a museum. But in the eyes of the then Director of the Belvedere (called the Österreichische Staatsgalerie at the time) it was too “arts-and-crafts” and vivid, whereupon Schiele reworked Edith’s dress in more muted hues. Technical analysis of the painting in 2018 brought this original version to light. This has been reconstructed and is shown here beside the final version of the painting.