Author
Egon Schiele
Movement / period
Expressionism
Technique
oil on canvas
Where it is
Belvedere, Vienna
The crumpled sheets are painted to look like bare, rocky earth — soil for a grave.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- The man in the painting is Schiele himself; the subject is linked to his break-up with his model and lover Wally.
- The crumpled sheets are painted to look like bare, rocky earth — soil for a grave.
- The angular, bony bodies are Schiele's signature nervous style.
- Schiele was repeatedly accused of indecency and once arrested over his drawings.
- He died at 28 of Spanish flu, three days after his pregnant wife.
More details Schiele paints himself as Death, embracing the lover he'd just left, the year he married.
What's on the canvas
Two Bodies, No Escape
The canvas is almost square, 150 by 180 centimetres, and it holds nothing but the two of them, pressed together, with no background detail to pull the eye away from the embrace. The man wears a coarse grey garment closer to a monk's habit than clothing; he kneels with his arms hanging loose, his face turned aside, his stare fixed somewhere past her — he isn't looking at the woman who is gripping him with both hands. She has a narrow face, dark, tangled hair, and a green dress streaked with rust and red, whether from the fabric itself or something more unsettling is left open. Both figures have unnaturally long fingers with knuckles that jut out like an anatomical diagram — Schiele drew hands obsessively his whole career, and here he pushes that angularity almost into the grotesque.
The pose balances on the edge of collapse: knees and elbows form a sharp, unstable triangle, as if both bodies were about to topple sideways. The palette is grey, rust-ochre, muddy green, black, with a single bright accent — a red smear at the woman's collar. The title states the subject outright, yet there's none of the usual iconography of death here: no scythe, no skull, no skeleton. Schiele's Death dresses like an ascetic and holds her the way a lover would, which is exactly why the scene reads less like violence than like a final, doomed goodbye. By Schiele's own standards the canvas is large: he usually worked on tall, narrow, near-life-size formats, while here the couple is set into an almost square field, as if laid inside a niche shaped like a gravestone. Each figure is outlined in a heavy black contour, as if cut with a knife — the same jagged line that runs through his graphite drawings. The background itself is barely painted at all, left pale and unfinished, as though the couple had been cut out of empty space.
In the upper right corner, printed in blocky capitals, sit the signature and date: EGON SCHIELE 1915. Schiele put his name on the front of the canvas rather than tucking it away on the back, a habit shared by painters close to the Secession, who treated a signature as one more compositional mark rather than a curator's footnote.
How it was made
A Wedding, a Draft Notice, and a Studio Mirror
1915 compresses an entire upheaval into a few weeks for Schiele. On 17 June he married Edith Harms, daughter of a modest but respectable Viennese family; four days later he was ordered to report for military service in Prague — Austria-Hungary was running short of soldiers deep into the war, and a painter once rejected on health grounds was now found fit. Shortly before the wedding he had broken with Wally Neuzil, his model and companion since 1911. According to accounts passed down by those who knew them, their last conversation took place in a café in Hietzing: Schiele told her he was marrying Edith but suggested they still spend a few weeks together every summer, without his wife. She refused and walked out; they never saw each other again. Nobody can verify the dialogue after more than a century, but biographers agree the break itself happened. A month into his Prague service Schiele was transferred to Vienna itself — close enough that in the evenings he could go back to his studio and keep painting; the harsher posting, clerking at a camp for Russian officer prisoners near Mühling, only began in May 1916, after Death and the Maiden was already finished.
Schiele painted the canvas in his studio at Hietzinger Hauptstraße 101, which he had rented in October 1912 and kept until June 1918, almost to the end of his life. It's this very painting that appears in the famous photograph of Schiele standing before his studio's large mirror, the canvas hanging unframed just behind him. Its working titles were far plainer — first "Man and Girl," then "Entwined Bodies" — and the present title only settled in 1917, after Wally died of scarlet fever on 25 December while serving as a Red Cross nurse in the town of Sinj in Dalmatia; she was 23. The painting, in other words, anticipated its own title by two years.
Edith's family — Protestant, headed by a master locksmith, living right across the street from Schiele's studio on Hietzinger Hauptstraße — initially opposed the match. Three years earlier, in April 1912, Schiele had been arrested in the town of Neulengbach on a charge of seducing a minor; the court dropped that charge within two weeks, leaving only a fine for indecent drawings police found in his house, but the scandal clung to his name for years afterward.
Where the imagery comes from
A Renaissance Theme, Turned Inside Out
Schiele didn't invent the "Death and the Maiden" subject — it comes out of the Northern Renaissance, where a skeletal old man seizes a young beauty as a memento mori — the best-known 16th-century versions are by the German masters Hans Baldung Grien and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, whose withered skeletons practically claw at richly dressed young women. Schiele inverts the formula: his Death isn't a skeleton but a man in a robe, and the girl clings to him rather than recoiling in horror. The closest teacher here is Gustav Klimt, who had taken Schiele under his wing back in 1907. Klimt's The Kiss is also a couple wrapped in one shared cloak, also tenderness pushed to the point where the two figures dissolve into each other. Schiele seems to borrow the same device — the shared garment, the embrace, the patterned fabric underfoot — and wrings all the gold out of it, leaving ash and ochre: in Klimt the cloak leads to ecstasy, in Schiele to burial.
There's a near-contemporary too: Oskar Kokoschka's Bride of the Wind (1913–14), where the artist painted himself and Alma Mahler entwined in a storm-tossed sky; it was made almost in parallel, and both painters moved in the same Viennese circles in these years, even as their paths diverged further by 1915. A third layer is an experience the whole Vienna scene shared in 1909: at the Kunstschau exhibition, the young Schiele saw Van Gogh's paintings for the first time, and that nervous, tearing line — think of Starry Night — pushed him toward the same distorting manner that gives us the sharp elbows and elongated fingers of this very canvas.
The German title itself predates Schiele: Franz Schubert set a Matthias Claudius poem called "Der Tod und das Mädchen" as a song in 1817, then reused its melody in the slow movement of his 1824 String Quartet No. 14, still nicknamed "Death and the Maiden." By the early 1900s the phrase was already Vienna's shorthand for a doomed encounter with death, and Schiele was drawing on that song tradition as much as on painting.
What happened to it
From the Studio to the Upper Belvedere
Schiele barely lived to see this painting acquire a reputation: he died of the Spanish flu on 31 October 1918, aged 28, three days after his pregnant wife Edith. Exactly where the canvas went in the years right after his death is thinly documented, but the point where the trail becomes solid is clear: in 1930 the Belvedere in Vienna acquired it, and according to the museum's own inventory record the purchase was made from the Munich Secession. Its inventory number, 3171, hasn't changed since, and for close to a century the canvas hasn't left the museum's walls. The Upper Belvedere palace itself was built in the early 18th century as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy and only became a museum after the First World War — so the painting and the building that houses it are almost coevals as museum pieces.
It has featured in every major Schiele retrospective the Belvedere has mounted — in 1954, 1968, 1990, 2011, and again in 2018, on the centenary of the artist's death — anchoring the room each time. Today it hangs in the Upper Belvedere's permanent collection of turn-of-the-century Viennese painting, alongside Klimt and other artists from the Secession circle, the very milieu where Schiele made his teenage debut and landed his first commissions. For the museum this is an unusually clean case: the painting's ownership history is documented almost without gaps from that 1930 purchase onward, a rarity for an early-20th-century Viennese collection so thoroughly scrambled by wars and forced sales in the decades that followed. Today it hangs in the Vienna 1900 rooms on the Upper Belvedere's second floor, a few steps from Klimt's Kiss, though the largest Schiele collection in the world isn't here at all — it belongs to Vienna's Leopold Museum.
The 1930 purchase came eight years before the 1938 Anschluss and the wave of Nazi confiscations and forced sales that later reshuffled a large share of Vienna's collections — that timing is exactly why the painting's provenance carries no wartime gap requiring a restitution inquiry, the kind many other Vienna Secession-era works still do.
Its afterlife
A Biopic, and a Grave Found a Century Later
The title has fused so completely with Schiele's own story that in 2016 a biopic about him was named exactly the same thing — Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden — directed by Dieter Berner, based on Hilde Berger's novel, which stages the affair with Wally and the marriage to Edith as a plot that seems lifted straight off this canvas; the film's posters quote the composition outright, two figures entwined against grey. The Austrian-Luxembourg co-production had its world premiere on 26 September 2016 at the Zurich Film Festival.
Exactly a century after Wally Neuzil's death, in 2017, historians and journalists located her grave in the Croatian town of Sinj, in the cemetery of St. Francis, where she'd been buried on 27 December 1917 next to an Austrian officer she'd never known. The find made headlines in art publications precisely because Wally's name is inseparable from this painting: a woman once left behind for a more advantageous marriage got, a hundred years on, a name and a place on the map again — an odd mirror of how her face has stayed fixed forever on the canvas named in her memory. The composition itself — a couple fused in an embrace on the verge of falling — has since become visual shorthand for doomed or toxic love, turning up on posters and book covers; museum publications often print it opposite Klimt's Kiss as a counterpoint: golden ecstasy there, the same embrace on the other side of a breakup here.
The 2016 biopic kept a second life: in July 2025 New York's Neue Galerie, a museum devoted to early-20th-century Viennese and German art, screened it again as part of its "Burning Passions: Love and Creativity" film series on artists and their turbulent affairs. The screening sold out in advance.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution page Belvedere, Vienna
Visual context
