Title: Portrait of a Woman (Wally Neuzil), 1912 (Egon Schiele)

Inventory number: K-115

Dimensions/Medium: 24.8 × 24.8 cm/gouache and pencil on paper

Characteristics: Signed and dated on the front, lower right: “Egon Schiele 1912”

Summary of Provenance

Otto Benesch first appeared as the lender of the portrait of a woman (Wally Neuzil) for a Schiele memorial exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna in 1948. Whether he was the sole owner at that time or owned the work jointly with his mother, Anna Benesch (née Weber), has not yet been clarified based on the available sources. However, Otto Benesch was likely not the first owner of the work. It is likely that he acquired the work from the Schiele collection of his father, Heinrich Benesch, who died in 1947 and who had “assembled the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s watercolors and drawings during Schiele’s lifetime”^[1]. Upon Otto Benesch’s death in 1964, the portrait of a woman passed by inheritance to his widow, Eva Benesch (née Steiner), who sold the work around 1967 to the William H. Schab Gallery in New York. From there, the work went to the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York and was acquired by a private Swiss collection. In 1998, the work was sold from the private Swiss collection to the London branch of Marlborough Fine Art. In London, Heidi Horten acquired the work on April 20, 1998.

^[1] Rudolf Leopold, Egon Schiele: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Salzburg 1972, p. 668.

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