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Portrait of Wally
Egon Schiele · Early Modern (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism)
- Artist
- Egon Schiele (1890–1918)
- Date
- 1912
- Dimensions
- 32 x 39.8 cm
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Location
- Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria
Portrait of Wally shows Walburga “Wally” Neuzil, the painter’s companion and favourite model, in a small, intimate head-and-shoulders portrait. She looks out at the viewer with large blue-green eyes, her head slightly tilted.
A closer look
Wally wears a dark dress with a white collar, and her reddish-brown hair is framed against a pale background. Schiele painted her face with nervous, expressive lines and touches of red, green and blue in the skin, giving her a fragile, slightly melancholy presence. It was painted as a companion piece to a self-portrait of Schiele of the same size. Wally lived with Schiele for four years, but he left her in 1915 to marry a woman of middle-class background; she died two years later as a nurse in the First World War.
More by Egon Schiele
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- Seated Woman with Bent Knees 1917
- Death and the Maiden 1915
- Dead City III 1911
- The Family 1918
- The embrace 1917
- The Hermits 1912