La Famille Schönberg

In the summer of 1907, a young Viennese painter named Richard Gerstl was spending his holidays with the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom he was teaching to paint. He set the whole household down on this canvas at their country retreat, Schoenberg, his wife Mathilde, and the children, loosely brushed and half dissolving into the light. Gerstl was 24 and already painting more freely than almost anyone in the city. Within a year it all came apart. He and Mathilde began an affair, she left and then returned to her husband, and in November 1908 Gerstl took his own life at 25. His canvases sat rolled up and forgotten for decades. The quick, nervous strokes you see here were thought barely finished at the time.