Egon Schiele:
Front View of a Seated Girl with Hat (Frontansicht eines sitzenden Mädchens mit Hut), 1914
Carpenter’s pencil on yellowish wove paper
48.2 × 31.5 cm
Auctioned at Galerie Kornfeld Auktionen AG in 2024; estimate CHF 320,000–400,000; passed.
(Kallir d1576)

The drawing belongs to Schiele’s fully mature middle period, when his line had become both sharper and more economical, capable of carrying an entire emotional register with the slightest shift of pressure. The girl sits frontally, her body held in a quiet, almost hesitant symmetry, while the hat — soft, rounded, and sitting close to the head — becomes the single anchoring weight in the composition. Schiele lets the figure emerge through the dry, grainy touch of the carpenter’s pencil, a tool that gives the contours a blunt, unpolished immediacy. The yellowish wove paper warms the entire sheet, softening the severity of the line and giving the girl’s presence a gentle, human glow.

She belongs to the moment when Wally Neuzil was still the quiet centre of Schiele’s studio life, a presence he returned to not for drama but for steadiness. By 1914 their shared world had narrowed to the rooms they worked in, a space where he could watch her settle into herself before the drawing began. That inwardness shapes this sheet: the quiet lift of the head, the hands loosely interlocked, the gaze turned somewhere private. Schiele follows her with a calm, confident stroke, letting the coat’s heavy folds, the hat, and the stillness between them carry the weight of the moment. It becomes the first note in a small sequence in which he traces the slow, unhurried rhythm of undressing, each pose a variation on the same quiet intimacy. Here, at the beginning, she is fully clothed, self‑contained, contemplative — a presence he captures with a tenderness that feels both observational and deeply familiar.

Her posture is both direct and withdrawn: the shoulders slightly rounded, the hands interlocked with a quiet firmness, the gaze drifting somewhere just beyond the viewer. The hat sits lightly above her curls, softening the outline of her face. Schiele’s line around the torso is remarkably light, almost tentative, as if he were tracing the outline of a thought rather than a body. Yet the drawing never feels unfinished; it has that characteristic 1914 clarity, where every mark is deliberate, pared down to what is essential.

What stands out most is the emotional temperature. The girl is not eroticised, not stylised into angular tension, but held in a moment of quiet presence with a faint guardedness in the mouth and eyes — a stillness that feels rare in Schiele’s work of this year. The carpenter’s pencil, with its coarse, resistant lead, gives the contours a fragile firmness, while the soft modelling of the face introduces a tenderness that anchors the entire sheet. It is a portrait of inwardness rather than display, a moment of calm in a year otherwise marked by sharper, more restless lines.