A Família

Schiele made this in 1918, the best year of his working life and his last. That spring he had finally had a real success, a large exhibition in Vienna, and he took a bigger studio while his wife Edith was expecting their first child. He painted a naked man, clearly himself, crouching behind a seated woman with a small child tucked between her knees, and at first he called it simply Crouching Couple. Then in the autumn the influenza that was moving across a war-exhausted Europe reached them. Edith died on 28 October, six months pregnant, and Schiele died three days later. He never finished the picture, and only afterwards did a friend, the writer Berta Zuckerkandl, rename the unfinished canvas The Family.