Schiele’s fellow artist Anton Josef Trčka (1893–1940), who from 1911 to 1914 studied at the Graphic Teaching and Research Institute in Vienna, captured Egon Schiele (1890–1918) several times in photographs. The present shot, which shows the artist in profile, seated and with his hands clasped, as well as
Egon Schiele with Toy Horse, which captured Schiele looking into the camera, were created at the same time. Both shots show the same painting in the background: the 1914 work
Houses by the Sea, which was first owned by the architect and co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956). At the “Austrian House” designed by Hoffmann for the
Deutsche Werkbundausstellung in Cologne in 1914, he placed Schiele’s oil painting over a settee in the reticently decorated reception room. This inclusion of the painting into a themed Wiener Werkstätte space, mostly kept in black and white, illustrates that Schiele’s at times ornamental-looking cityscapes fitted in adequately with the Wiener Werkstätte’s notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or universal work of art.
KJ, 2024
