Death and the Maiden, 1915

ABOUT THIS PAINTING

This painting is haunting. Death and the Maiden (1915-1916) is not just an artwork – it is a reckoning. Egon Schiele dares to paint himself as Death, hollow-eyed and grasping, as if he is the one who suffers. As if he is the victim. But the truth is, he is the one who ended his passionate love affair with Walburga (Vally) Neuzil, casting her aside for a more ‘respectable’ match – Edith Harms, a woman of higher social standing. And yet, in this desperate embrace, it is Vally who looks spent, collapsed in his grip. He clutches her as if she is slipping away, as if he cannot bear to let go.

This is a man who had the audacity to offer Vally a contract after he proposed marriage to another woman – two weeks together every year – as though she could be neatly contained. Vally tore it up. She walked away and into her own (doomed) fate, later dying as a nurse on the frontlines of war.

The background of this artwork is barren, the sheets beneath them spectral, as if foreshadowing burial. Schiele’s jagged lines and raw emotion carve the figures apart even as they cling together. The painting is a study in possession and loss, desire and destruction – an unflinching portrait of a man who chose convention over passion, and of the woman who refused to be kept in his cruel, suffocating, eternal embrace.

More than a personal reckoning, Death and the Maiden is an expression of the broader anxieties of its time – love overshadowed by war, the fragility of human relationships, and the inevitability of death. It stands as one of Schiele’s most striking and introspective masterpieces, a portrait of impermanence painted in anguish. – Sophie Haydock

Painted: 1915
Location: Vienna, Austria
Repository: The Belvedere
Artist: Egon Schiele
Original Format: Oil paint on canvas