Egon Schiele:
Dreaming Woman (Die Träumende) (Gertie Schiele), 1911
Gouache, watercolor and pencil
45.7 × 31.7 cm
Private collection
(Kallir d864)

In 1910 and 1911, Egon Schiele’s younger sister Gerti (or Gertrude/Gertie), four years his junior, became one of the most constant and quietly grounding presences in his work. Though she appears in drawings as early as 1903, it is in these years that her presence deepens, moving from familial familiarity to a figure through whom Schiele could explore a more intimate, searching visual language. Across graphite studies, watercolors, and gouaches, her features shift subtly from alertness to introspection, each sheet carrying its own emotional temperature.

Dreaming Woman sits within a concentrated sequence of 1911 drawings in which Schiele sharpens his contour and experiments with the expressive possibilities of diluted color. Gerti’s closed eyes and gently tilted head create a moment of inwardness that feels both private and offered. The patchwork garment—its reds, blacks, pinks, and pale yellows arranged in irregular blocks—softens the figure into a set of chromatic rhythms, a device Schiele used that year to heighten emotional resonance through abstraction rather than gesture.

The plain background isolates her completely, allowing the line to carry the weight of expression. This spareness is characteristic of Schiele’s 1911 portrait drawings, where the removal of setting intensifies the sitter’s presence. The sheet also reflects the broader shift underway that year, when Schiele stepped decisively away from academic influence and began shaping the psychologically charged figuration that would define his mature style. Gerti’s recurring appearance becomes part of that transition — a familiar anchor during a period of rapid artistic change.

Though this drawing remains in private hands, it is widely reproduced and often cited as a key example of Schiele’s early psychological portraiture. Its signature and date place it firmly within the year when his line grew tauter, his palette more symbolic, and his figures more inwardly alive.