Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka Jr.) (1916): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka Jr.) (1916) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890–1918).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Egon Schiele depicted a small child, the son of a friend, in this drawing devoid of setting. The child teeters at an awkward angle, seemingly unsupported but for a multipatterned fabric wrap that occupies the artist’s primary interest. This contorted pose is typical of Schiele’s many drawings of people in which he explored the expressive capacity of the human form, often using the body to indicate their psychic state (see another drawing by Schiele nearby). He died in the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 at age 28, leaving a vast number of drawings.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka Jr.)
• Date: 1916
• Creator attribution: Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890–1918)
• Culture: Austria
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Gouache, watercolor, and graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 49.9 x 32.2 cm (19 5/8 x 12 11/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Austrian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1964.285

A detail from the museum

The child seen in this drawing, Anton Peschka Jr., served as a model for several compositions by Egon Schiele.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Schiele, Egon. Zeichnungen Egon Schiele: 12 Blatter in Originalgrosse. Vienna: Richard Lanyi, 1917.
• Catalogue of the Severance and Greta Millikin Collection. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1990.
• Kallir, Jane. Egon Schiele: The Complete Works. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.