Description
Egon Schiele – Cardinal and Nun (Caress)
Egon Schiele – Cardinal and Nun (Caress), 1912
This hand-painted Egon Schiele painting, Cardinal and Nun (Caress), is an oil reproduction of a deliberately provocative work from 1912. The original is held at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
The scene and the title
A cardinal in red and a nun in a dark habit embrace; Schiele exhibited and published the work under the title Caress (Die Liebkosung). The charged, forbidden embrace is a knowing response to Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss of 1907.
An answer to Klimt
Where Klimt gilded and idealised his lovers, Schiele moves the same gesture into a religious setting and charges it with the tension between desire and prohibition.
The original’s medium and format
The original is oil on canvas, measuring 70 × 80.5 cm (inv. 455).
Provenance
The painting was owned by the Vienna collector Dr. Heinrich Rieger (1918–1939) and then passed under the Nazi regime to the dealer Friedrich Welz. After the war it was restituted to Rieger’s heir (1948) and later sold; it is now held at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our reproduction is hand-painted in oil on canvas and painted in the size you choose.
