Egon Schiele:
Sitting Boy with Folded Hands (Sitzender Bub mit gefalteten Händen), 1910
gouache, watercolor and brush and black ink over pencil on paper
43 × 28.7 cm
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2022 for USD 781,200
(Kallir d453)

The sitting boy with folded hands comes from Schiele’s important year of 1910, when his drawings began to show a new kind of emotional clarity. The child sits upright, hands pressed together, yet nothing about the pose feels stiff. Schiele approaches him with a quiet, attentive warmth, as if he were trying to understand the boy’s mood rather than simply record his posture. The hands, painted in a strong red, immediately draw the eye. They feel protective, a little tense, and strangely tender at the same time — a small gesture that seems to hold the whole drawing together.

The boy’s dark clothing gives the figure weight, while the plain background keeps all attention on him. Schiele’s washes of color soften the sheet, but the ink line keeps it alert. His contour is already quick and sensitive, catching the slight tilt of the head and the narrow slope of the shoulders with a kind of quiet honesty. The uneven balance of the legs adds a touch of vulnerability, as though the boy is trying to sit still but can’t quite settle.

Children appear often in Schiele’s drawings from this period. Many came from the working districts around him, where families were more open to letting their children pose for small sums. What seems to have drawn Schiele to them, though, was their natural ease — the way they sat, shifted, and looked without the practiced habits of adult models. Their unfiltered presence gave him room to explore mood and character in a more direct way, and that openness is very much present in this boy.

This sheet also reflects the larger shift taking place in Schiele’s work at the time. The decorative touches of his student years fall away, replaced by a more searching, personal way of drawing. The line becomes a tool for feeling as much as for form, and the figure carries a sense of inner life that is new in his work. In this drawing, that change is quiet but unmistakable: the boy’s posture, the charged stillness of the hands, and the alertness of the face all point to an artist beginning to work with a deeper, more expressive purpose.

What might have been a straightforward study becomes something more personal. The drawing carries a sense of closeness, as if the boy is letting the artist see him just as he is. It is this quiet, unforced connection that gives the sheet its warmth. Even in 1910, Schiele was already able to find depth in the simplest of poses, and to let the inner life of his sitter rise gently to the surface.