Description
Egon Schiele – Dead Mother I, 1910
The hand-painted Egon Schiele painting Dead Mother I is an oil reproduction of a work from 1910. The original is held by the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Two lives on one small panel
Two beings share the small wooden panel: above, the grey extinguished face of the mother, eyes closed; below, in a pale oval, a living infant with pink-orange skin and an open gaze. Only a few centimetres separate them.
The black that holds it together
Everything else is black, laid on in dense circling strokes that eddy around both faces like a cocoon or a thrown cloth. That dark mass is what gives a small painting the weight you would expect of a large canvas.
The hands
Two hands reach out of the black: the child’s small red-edged palm at the centre, and at the lower left the bony, greyish hand of the mother. Neither touches the other.
Its place in Schiele’s work
The painting was made in 1910, when he was twenty, and it is the first in his series of maternal images. It is signed and dated at the upper right, “S. 10”.
Technique and format of the original
The original is not canvas: it is painted in oil and pencil on wood, in the small format 32.1 × 25.7 cm (inv. LM 475), and hangs today in the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our painter works the reproduction by hand in oil on canvas, in the size you choose. Before delivery you receive a photograph of the painting for approval.
