Portrait of Erich Lederer with His Hand Touching the Face

• Egon Schiele (1890–1918)
• 1915
• Pencil, black chalk on paper
• Leopold Museum, Vienna

In this portrait, Egon Schiele depicted his friend and student Erich Lederer, six years his junior. He was the son of Serena and August Lederer, Austrian industrialists who from 1899 compiled a remarkable collection of Gustav Klimt’s works including Philosophy (1900). Klimt introduced Schiele to this family in 1912, and Lederer, who was greatly interested in art, soon became close friends with the young artist. It was Schiele who mediated the sale of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1902), owned by Carl Reininghaus, to the Lederers in 1915.