The Family

The 20th century brought two World Wars, the Holocaust, unimaginable atrocities, and the Spanish Flu. The horrific scale of this pandemic is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 100 million victims. For perspective, that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.

Egon Schiele was one of the great artists who died from it. The Family was unfinished at the time of Schiele’s death and initially was titled Squatting Couple. It was one of his last paintings. In it we see Schiele himself with his wife Edith and their unborn child. In his last letter he described his concern for her, writing: “Dear Mother Schiele, Edith got the Spanish Flu eight days ago and has pneumonia. She is six months pregnant. The disease is very serious and life-threatening; I am preparing myself for the worst.” Edith died of Spanish flu in the sixth month of her pregnancy. Three days after she died, Egon did too.

Please take care!

P.S. Here's the plague in art, the 10 paintings you should know in the times of coronavirus...