The fur collar

In the late summer of 1917, with the First World War in its fourth year, Austria-Hungary sent an exhibition of its modern art to neutral Sweden. It opened at Liljevalchs, a Stockholm gallery, with Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka among the artists, and this woman wrapped in a heavy fur collar went with it. The Swedish catalogue called her Blondin, the blonde. That one word is almost all we know about the colours, because the picture survives only in black-and-white photographs, her pale face above the dark mass of fur and a hand rising at the lower right. Its last owner was Josef Siller, a Viennese hotelier who kept his art at his Hotel and Café Siller on the Franz-Josefs-Kai. The building was badly damaged in an air raid on 11 April 1945, and the painting is presumed to have been destroyed with the rest of his collection.