Egon Schiele:
Seated Girl with Hair Ribbon (Sitzendes Mädchen mit Haarschleife), 1917
Gouache and charcoal on paper
46 × 28.6 cm
Auctioned at Dorotheum, 2024 for EUR 737,500
(Kallir d1878)

Dorotheum’s auction note remarks that this sheet is one of the rare works from Schiele’s final years in which he used that peculiar, scratch‑like application of colour he developed around 1914. It gives the surface a quiet, flickering energy, as if the figure were held together by strands of light rather than solid modelling. In this drawing, that approach feels especially tender: the girl sits upright, composed, and meets us with those large, dark eyes that seem to take in the world without fear or suspicion. There is seriousness in her gaze, but not sadness — a kind of alert calm that feels unmistakably late‑Schiele.

Beyond the formal qualities, the drawing gains another layer of poignancy when we consider who the sitter is believed to be. It is thought that the girl is Schiele’s niece — the daughter of his sister Gertrude (Gerti) and the painter Anton Peschka. She carried her mother’s name and was called Gertrude, or simply Gertie, within the family. Her life was a difficult one. She began suffering from epilepsy at the age of twelve, and when she turned eighteen, in 1931, she was taken into an institution. By 1936 her diagnosis had shifted to schizophrenia, and she remained under care until her death in 1944. When I was in Vienna, I found that young Gertie rests in the same grave as her mother Gertrude, her father Anton Peschka, and her brother Anton Jr. — a quiet, almost hidden reminder of how closely the family remained bound, both in life and in the way they were finally laid to rest.

Children appear throughout Schiele’s work, but the way he sees them changes profoundly over time. In the early years, he often drew children from poor families, and the sensual undertone in some of those sheets is impossible to ignore. But once Edith entered his life in 1915, something shifted. The child became less a vessel for psychological projection and more a presence in its own right. From 1916 onward, many of his portraits of children — especially those of his patrons — are marked by a new clarity, a new respect for the child’s own personality. Only a few, like his nephew Anton Peschka or the occasional unidentified sitter, appear unclothed, and even then the tone is different: more observational, less charged.

This girl belongs to that later moment. She sits with a natural dignity, her short hair slightly disheveled except for the dark ribbon she has tied into it — a small gesture of self‑adornment that feels wonderfully human. Her nudity is unselfconscious; she bends one leg just enough to cover herself, not out of shame but out of instinct. Schiele outlines her with those decisive black charcoal strokes that pull the figure forward from the blank page. There is nothing extraneous — no setting, no props, no narrative. She exists in her own space, self‑contained and quietly present.

What moves me most is how Schiele manages to suggest both independence and vulnerability without tipping into sentimentality. The girl is neither idealized nor symbolized; she is simply herself. And in that simplicity, the drawing becomes something more than a portrait. It becomes an image of childhood as Schiele came to understand it late in his life: open, unguarded, and possessed of a small but unmistakable inner strength.

The original auction note rightly highlights the unusual colouring technique — those fine, etched lines of gouache that give the figure its subtle, inner hum. But what lingers is the quietness of the whole sheet. Knowing who she may have been, that quietness feels even more affecting — as if Schiele had preserved a moment of presence that life itself could not protect.