Fragment of a Page from a Sketchbook with a Compositional Draft for Sawmill, 1913, untitled

In the summer of 1913, Egon Schiele (1890–1918) embarked on several trips to Carinthia, writing to his friend, the art collector Franz Hauer, on 13th August 1913: “Yesterday, I discovered charming log cottages and mills, which I intend to paint.” In this sketch, Schiele twice captured the motif of such a house, possibly as a preliminary study for the painting Sawmill (private collection; Kallir P271), which the artist created in 1913. The left part of the house, with the two heavily outlined windows and the slanted shingle roof, especially, allows us to infer that this draft was indeed a sketch for the afore-mentioned painting. A further, similar sketch, also created around this time, is also kept at the Leopold Museum: Fragment of a Page from a Sketchbook with Compositional Draft for “Sawmill”, 1913.

LVD, 2024