Portrait of Edith Schiele in a striped dress

Egon Schiele was the ‘enfant terrible’ of the Viennese avant-garde. His Expressionist works on themes like budding sexuality, death and decay scandalised early 20th-century Vienna. From 1915, when he married Edith and painted this portrait of her, his work changed, losing its distinctive jaggedness of line and becoming softer and smoother. The tragedy of the portrait lies in the fact that the couple were both to die in the Spanish flu pandemic just three years later.