Portrait of the artist's wife, Edith Schiele

In 1918, the last year of the war, the Austrian State Gallery, as the Belvedere was then called, bought this portrait of Edith Schiele, the painter's wife. It was the first painting by Schiele to enter an Austrian museum. The gallery's director, the art historian Franz Martin Haberditzl, found it too colourful and too close to decorative arts and crafts, and Schiele went back and repainted her clothes. The skirt had been a checked pattern in warm, bright colours. He turned it into the greyish blue and white you see now, and the orange pullover became a cool blue. The first version was never entirely lost. A photograph taken in 1918 records it, and a technical examination in 2018 brought its colours back to light. The Belvedere has since shown a reconstruction of that first version beside the finished canvas.