National Gallery Prague — Prague, Czech Republic

The story goes that this was a rush job over the New Year holiday, when the printer had nobody else free and needed something for the hoardings by the following week. The actress it advertises liked it enough to tie him to a contract for years afterwards, and people supposedly peeled the things off walls overnight to keep them.

He'd walked out of the official Viennese art establishment years before this with a group who set up their own building to show in, which is roughly the world this belongs to. The reading you come across most often is that all the figures here are one girl dreaming herself into different lives — though as far as I can tell that's other people's guesswork, not anything he ever said.

It's paper rather than canvas — watercolour and crayon worked over gouache, which is part of why so much of it stays bare. The woman is generally taken to be his wife, a couple of years into a marriage he'd made, from what I've read, at least partly for the respectability of it. He drew her again and again.