Richard Gerstl

Vienna, around 1907. Arnold Schoenberg, the composer then pushing music toward atonality, was taking painting lessons from a man barely into his twenties. Richard Gerstl had already broken with the academy and with the decorative gold of Gustav Klimt, working instead in a raw, scraped, almost violent brushwork that Vienna would not buy. He sold next to nothing.

He had grown close to the Schoenberg circle and painted its members, and in the summer of 1908 he began an affair with the composer's wife, Mathilde. When Schoenberg found them out, the scandal cut Gerstl off from the only community he had. On the night of 4 November 1908 he burned his letters and drawings in his studio and hanged himself before a mirror. He was 25.

His family kept what survived and said little, so the canvases sat unseen until a Vienna dealer brought them out in 1931. Only after the Second World War was Gerstl counted among the first Austrian Expressionists. Among the last things he painted was a full-length nude self-portrait, standing and staring straight out.