#austrian

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.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.