Egon Schiele:
Erich Lederer Standing with Hand on Hip (Erich Lederer, stehend, Hand in die Hüfte gestützt), 1913
Gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper
48.3 × 32.1 cm
Auctioned in 2013 for GBP 657,250
(Kallir d1219)

In this poised, slightly theatrical study of Erich Lederer, Schiele catches the young collector at the moment when admiration, friendship, and artistic curiosity were beginning to intertwine. The pose is simple yet charged: one hand set firmly on the hip, the other relaxed, the body angled just enough to suggest a mixture of confidence and youthful uncertainty. Schiele responds to this tension with a line that feels both affectionate and alert, tracing the contours of the figure with that quick, searching precision he reserved for people who mattered to him.

This sheet is also the key preparatory study for the oil portrait now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Around Christmas and New Year 1912–13, Schiele made a flurry of gouache portraits of the fifteen‑year‑old Erich, working in the quiet rooms of the Lederer home in Györ. From roughly twenty sheets, it was this one — with its unusual mix of profile and direct gaze — that he marked up for transfer, the numbered grid still visible along the borders. You feel him pausing over it, recognising that this was the moment he wanted to carry forward onto the larger canvas.

Schiele had come to the Lederers through Klimt, who opened that door for him after the Neulengbach ordeal. August and Serena were loyal patrons of Klimt, but it was their son who gravitated toward Schiele with a kind of instinctive loyalty. The portrait seems to grow out of that early closeness. Schiele worked quickly, returning in early January to refine the most promising sheets, adding gouache where he felt the form needed rounding, lightening, or simply a touch of breath.

Gouache appears only in small, deliberate touches — the hair, tie, lips, and hand — leaving the clothing almost entirely in line, which gives the figure a clarity and lightness that suits the study. The face is rendered with a tenderness unusual for Schiele in these years, as though he were trying to understand not only the likeness but the temperament of the boy who would become one of his most loyal supporters. Alessandra Comini — the pioneering Schiele scholar whose work shaped much of the modern understanding of his portraiture — was the first to note the subtle doubling in the composition, the angle of the arm echoing the angle of the ear, a small, almost playful symmetry that Schiele carried into the finished oil, where the splayed fingers add a second, deliberate rhyme.

What makes the work especially moving is the sense of stillness it holds. Schiele often captured his sitters in moments of psychological strain or restless movement, yet here he allows Erich to stand calmly, meeting the viewer with a directness that is almost disarming. The result is a portrait that feels less like a study for something else and more like a moment preserved — a young man standing before an artist who saw him clearly, and with unusual gentleness, in 1913.