Hermits, 1912

This painting, titled Hermits, shows two approximately life-size men in robes of brown and black shades, fused into one body of garments. The left figure is a self-depiction, but the person standing behind it cannot be identified clearly. Is it another portrait of the artist himself, of his mentor Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) or of his father Adolf, who died when Schiele was young? This unanswered question has inspired many different interpretations of the double portrait. Egon Schiele (1890–1918) himself wrote about the painting in a letter to his collector Carl Reininghaus (1857–1929): “It is not a gray sky, but a grieving world in which the two bodies are moving, they have grown up alone in it, come up from the soil organically; this whole world including the figures is meant to represent the ‘decrepitude’ of all things; a single withered rose that exhales its white innocence, opposed to the wreathed flowers on the two heads. – The left one bows before such a serious world, his flowers are meant to appear cold, relentless, extinguished flowers I would like to call them or compare them with words of equal volume uttered by one terminally ill who can now only stammer, hollowly and hoarsely; I am quite content with the way the flowers are painted here, there could really be fewer; but the faded colors in which I have painted them are intentional, otherwise the poetic thought and the vision would be lost, along with the ambiguity of the figures, which are intended as sunken into themselves, the bodies of men tired of life, suicidal, but bodies of feeling men.– Think of the two figures as a cloud of dust similar to this earth which wants to build up and must collapse weakly.”

VG, 2022