Description
Egon Schiele – Mother and Child, 1912
This hand-painted Egon Schiele painting, Mother and Child, is an oil reproduction of the work he painted in 1912. The original is held by the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Two faces in the dark
The scene is reduced to two heads, pressed close together and pushed right to the front of the picture. There is no room around them, no interior and no landscape — only a dense, dark ground built from short, abrupt strokes.
The child and the mother
The child looks straight out of the painting with wide blue eyes and pale curls; the mother’s eyes are closed, her head inclined over the child’s. The alertness of one and the withdrawal of the other are set side by side within the same embrace.
Colour against a dark ground
The flesh tones are laid on in pale, almost chalky notes that step forward out of the dark ground, and the hands are painted as flat, splayed fans of fingers. Along the right edge the picture is signed and dated “EGON SCHIELE 1912”.
The original’s medium and format
The original is not a canvas: unlike most of Schiele’s work it is painted in oil on wood (on a wooden panel), and it is small — 36.5 × 29.2 cm (inv. 652), an upright panel.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our reproduction is hand-painted in oils on canvas and we paint it in the size you choose.
