Sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey

Paula Fey was 22 when Richard Gerstl painted her with her sister Karoline in 1905. Their family and his had been friends since the children were small. The Belvedere describes the sisters as sitting in their ball gowns after a night of dancing, and the painter did them no favours. Two women in their mid-twenties look older here, drained of colour, their faces set like masks, their lips almost bloodless. The white dresses are dragged across the canvas in loose, pale strokes, and the pair sit side by side against a dark, empty room without turning to each other. In 1961 a Viennese art writer researching Gerstl wrote to Paula, by then 78. She could no longer recall much, but she remembered him as a man of very few words, a little odd even as a young lad.