Egon SCHIELE

Drawn in the final year of Egon Schiele’s short life, the present sheet is a portrait of the Viennese industrialist and art collector August Lederer (1857-1936). August Lederer, his wife Serena and eldest son Erich were among the artist’s most significant patrons. The second wealthiest family in Vienna, after the Rothschilds, the Lederers assembled a superb art collection, mostly devoted to artists of the Vienna Secession. They were the most important patrons and collectors of the work of Gustav Klimt, by whom they owned some twenty paintings and numerous drawings, although much of the collection was destroyed during the Second World War.

It was through Klimt that Schiele was first introduced to the Lederer family in 1912, and he became especially close to their young son Erich Lederer (1896-1985), a budding collector who greatly admired the artist’s work. Schiele was to spend Christmas and New Year of 1912 as a guest on the Lederer estate in Györ in Hungary, when he began work on a painted portrait of the fifteen-year-old Erich, commissioned by the sitter. It is said that, upon first meeting Schiele, August Lederer asked him if he was as good as his son Erich said he was. In response, the young artist, then aged twenty-two, took out some paper, pencils and watercolours and, looking into a hallway mirror, produced a striking self-portrait drawing on the spot. 

Over the next few years Schiele established an enduring friendship with the Lederer family, often visiting them at their home in Vienna and occasionally giving Erich drawing lessons. As Alessandra Comini has noted, ‘The patronage of this sympathetic and influential family was an important factor in Schiele’s eventual personal rehabilitation and one which deepened his appreciation of and interest in others.’ August and Serena Lederer always remained somewhat aloof from Schiele, however, and only owned one other painting him, apart from the portrait of their son, along with several drawings. Erich Lederer, on the other hand, became a lifelong friend of the artist and continued to collect his drawings for many years after Schiele’s death.

Schiele produced drawings of every member of the Lederer family, including three other portraits of August Lederer, all drawn in 1918, which were each acquired by the sitter and share the same later provenance as the present sheet. A stylistically comparable drawing of Lederer, showing him facing to the right, was on the art market in 2013, while another charcoal drawing of him looking to the left is in a private collection5. A third portrait drawing of August Lederer of the same date, again showing him looking to the left, is also in a private collection. As has been noted by one scholar, in the present sheet, ‘deftly sketched in only a few moments, Schiele sensitively captures the formally attired sitter, looking off to the left, a rather remote figure.’

The authenticity of the present sheet has been confirmed by Jane Kallir, who has assigned the drawing the catalogue raisonné number D.2455a in her archives.