Egon Schiele:
Self‑Portrait (Selbstporträt), 1913
Pencil on crème wove paper
45.7 × 28.7 cm
Auctioned at Ketterer Kunst in 2022 for €250,000
(Kallir d1425a)

What first meets the eye here is the calm, almost hesitant way the figure takes shape on the page, as though Schiele allowed the line to find him rather than the other way around. In the actual drawing, the face emerges in those lightly trembling strokes that feel both deliberate and exposed, the upper head turning slightly outward while the lower study bows inward, creating a quiet double self‑portrait in which he depicts himself in two different poses. The eyes in the upper figure sit deep and attentive, registering the moment of being observed, while the mouth keeps its narrow, unembellished firmness that sets the drawing’s introspective tone. The cream paper softens the modelling, letting the skin appear gently illuminated from within, the untouched ground becoming part of the portrait’s atmosphere. A slight unevenness in the shoulders lends the pose its human immediacy, and the quick, restless touches in the hair reinforce that sense of a moment caught rather than arranged. What remains is the openness of the sheet, its gentle refusal to close itself off or polish its edges, holding a moment of self‑scrutiny with a quiet honesty that lingers, all the more striking given that only five self‑portraits on paper have appeared on the auction market in the past ten years.

From the moment Schiele stepped away from the Academy, he began shaping a language that was entirely his own, sharp and direct, and already unmistakable by 1910. He worked with a kind of urgency, turning to himself again and again, not out of vanity but because the face and body were the quickest way to test what he felt. Many of the sheets from this year are simple sketches, moments where he tried something out, letting the line move ahead of certainty, and this drawing belongs to that rhythm. It was a year filled with self‑portraits, each one a small attempt to understand himself from a slightly different angle. His self‑portraits from these years often carry that mix of tension and vulnerability: the twisted poses, the wide eyes, the sudden shifts in expression. They are less about likeness than about trying to understand what it means to inhabit a body at a moment when everything around him felt unstable. In this drawing, the two heads — one lifted, one bent — echo that restlessness. They show him circling his own presence, looking for a shape that feels true. It is this steady, almost stubborn attention to the self, to its contradictions and its unease, that would define his short career and make him one of the most compelling figures of Viennese modernism.