Vienna

Egon Schiele

Squatting Couple (The Family)

1918

Oil on canvas, 150 × 160.8 cm. Belvedere, Vienna

A naked man and woman squat, one behind the other, in a dim interior, and a small clothed child sits at the woman's feet. The man's face resembles the painter's own.

• Berta Zuckerkandl was the first to call it The Family.
• Spanish flu killed his wife Edith, pregnant with their child, in 1918; he died three days after her.
• Look at how the three figures stack into a pyramid; only the man meets our eyes.
• Muted browns and greens surround the yellow-ochre of the man's body, whose bony, mottled limbs open out around the woman squatting just below him.
• It entered the Belvedere among its new acquisitions of 1947 to 1951.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art