Description
Egon Schiele – Portrait of Wally Neuzil
Egon Schiele – Portrait of Wally Neuzil, 1912
This hand-painted Egon Schiele painting, Portrait of Wally Neuzil, is an oil reproduction of one of his most beloved portraits, painted in 1912. The original is held at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Who Wally was
The sitter is Walburga “Wally” Neuzil (1894–1917), Schiele’s long-term partner and model. The museum calls it arguably her best-known portrait, painted as a counterpart to Schiele’s own self-portrait: she is shown half-length, with reddish-blond hair and oversized, sparkling blue eyes.
The original’s medium and format
Unlike most of Schiele’s canvases, the original is oil on wood (a wooden panel), and small — 32 × 39.8 cm (inv. 453). The museum reads it as an exercise in basic geometric shapes and their harmonious balance.
Provenance and a long dispute
Its provenance runs from the Vienna dealer Lea Bondi Jaray to the Nazi collector Friedrich Welz, who obtained it in 1939 during “Aryanization”, and later to Rudolf Leopold. In 1998 the painting was seized by US authorities while on loan to MoMA in New York; the dispute was only settled in July 2010, when the Leopold Museum paid the Bondi estate USD 19 million and kept the work.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our reproduction is hand-painted in oil on canvas and painted in the size you choose.
