1916
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka Jr.) is a 1916 by Egon Schiele, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A small boy stands crooked, like he might tip over. His arms dangle. A busy cloth wraps around him, full of stripes and checks. Schiele drew his friend’s son without a background, so the kid looks like he’s floating. The pose feels wobbly on purpose—Schiele did this a lot to show how people feel inside, not just how they look. If you like how Schiele twists bodies, look up his other drawings at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Egon Schiele depicted a small child, the son of a friend, in this drawing devoid of setting. The child teeters at an awkward angle, seemingly unsupported but for a multipatterned fabric wrap that occupies the artist’s primary interest. This contorted pose is typical of Schiele’s many drawings of people in which he explored the expressive capacity of the human form, often using the body to indicate their psychic state (see another drawing by Schiele nearby). He died in the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 at age 28, leaving a vast number of drawings.
The child seen in this drawing, Anton Peschka Jr., served as a model for several compositions by Egon Schiele.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (German: ; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painter.
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