Egon Schiele:
Portrait of Eva Freund (née Gallus) (Bildnis Eva Freund [geb. Gallus]), 1910
watercolour and black crayon on paper
20.3 × 30.2 cm (8 × 11 7/8 in.)
Auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, in 2010 for GBP 565,250
(Kallir d469a)

Olga Eva Freund (née Gallus) was in her mid‑twenties when she sat for two portrait drawings by Egon Schiele. An opera singer of some standing in early‑twentieth‑century Prague, she appears to have been unmarried at the time these works were made: one sheet bears her maiden name, though Schiele rendered it, with his usual carelessness, as “Aga Gallus.” The slip feels almost tender in hindsight — a small human trace in the midst of an intense year of artistic searching. Eva’s poised features and quiet self‑possession clearly resonated with him, and she became one of the more memorable presences in his 1910 circle. In a gentle twist of biography, another watercolor from the same year depicts her future husband, the banker Otto Freund, suggesting that Schiele encountered the two around the same moment, before their lives were formally joined. Together, these works offer a glimpse into the social world that steadied Schiele during this formative period — a network of friends, patrons, and sympathetic sitters who helped anchor his early independence.

The present portrait belongs to this small constellation. Alongside this drawing Schiele also produced a related drawing of Eva, each capturing a slightly different shade of her presence. Her distinctive features and calm, inward‑leaning expression seem to invite a slower kind of looking, and Schiele responds with a delicacy that feels unusually attentive for this moment in his development.

In this drawing, he brings together two qualities that were deepening rapidly in 1910: the crisp assurance of his line and a more exploratory sense of colour. The wide‑brimmed hat, rendered in expansive, softly mottled blues, becomes the sheet’s quiet centre of gravity — a gentle counterbalance to the sitter’s composed stillness.

As Jane Kallir observes, Schiele’s watercolours from this moment follow the rhythm of the line rather than traditional modelling, setting flat chromatic areas against mottled flesh tones and using negative space to hold the figure in place. By varying the density and overlap of his washes, he created subtle shifts in texture and atmosphere, giving this portrait its understated warmth and its sense of calm, attentive presence.