Egon Schiele:
Seated Woman with Black Stockings (Sitzende Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen), 1911
gouache, watercolor, brush and black ink and pencil on paper
54.6 × 37.2 cm (21 ½ × 14 5/8 in.)
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2021 for USD 810,000
(Kallir d826a)

Drawn in 1911, Seated Woman with Black Stockings belongs to one of Egon Schiele’s most transformative years — a moment when his line became a conduit for psychological intensity. Executed in gouache, watercolor, brush and black ink, and pencil, the sheet reveals the full range of his graphic vocabulary: abrupt contour, trembling wash, and a line that seems to hover between tenderness and tension. Though it surfaced only later, the drawing has been authenticated.

The sitter adjusts her stocking with one hand while the other rests lightly on her knee. Her red skirt and scalloped white blouse introduce a note of theatricality, while the black stockings — a recurring motif in Schiele’s work — anchor the composition with both sensuality and structural weight. The warm, unprimed paper, characteristic of Schiele’s 1911 sheets, heightens the immediacy of the figure, allowing the line to sit on the surface with striking clarity.

But it is the woman’s gaze that gives the drawing its quiet, unsettling power. She looks slightly away, neither inviting nor refusing attention, caught in a moment that feels both private and aware of being observed. It is a gaze that resists easy interpretation — self-contained, perhaps wary, perhaps simply lost in thought. Schiele’s models in 1911 often came from his immediate circle, young women who appear repeatedly across his drawings, and this familiarity lends the sheet a lived, unvarnished intimacy.

Schiele’s break from academic convention is fully visible here. He was no longer interested in idealized beauty; instead, he probed the human figure as a site of emotional truth. The sitter’s posture — compact, guarded, yet undeniably present — reflects the psychological candor that defines his mature style. The costume’s palette of red, white, and black evokes both cabaret and domestic interior, placing her somewhere between performance and privacy.

As the viewer, one is left with a question that lingers long after the first glance:
Is she withdrawing from our gaze — or quietly measuring it?
Schiele leaves the answer suspended, inviting the soft tension between presence and distance to draw you in and breathe through the entire sheet.

When the drawing appeared at Christie’s in 2021, the auction note emphasized the psychological immediacy and the drawing’s place within the artist’s evolving treatment of the female figure, a theme that would dominate his oeuvre until his death in 1918.