Sotheby’s will be selling an oil painting by Egon Schiele on May 16th as part of its Impressionist and Modern art Evening sale. The work is Schiele’s first oil painting done when he was 19 years old:
Daring in its technique, the work offers the earliest expression of Schiele’s extraordinary vision. Danaë is distinguished further as the artist’s first majoroil painting of a female nude, heralding the revolutionary aesthetic his art would develop over the next decade, until his untimely death at the age of 28.
Danaë will be on view at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on 27 & 28 April, before returning to New York for exhibition beginning 5 May. The work, which marks the first major figural oil painting by Schiele to appear at auction since 2001, is estimated to sell for $30–40 million in the May evening sale.
Sotheby’s set the current auction record for any work by Egon Schiele when his 1914 landscape Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) sold for $39.8 million in 2011. However, an important figural oil by the artist has not appeared at auction since 2001, when Sotheby’s sold Porträt des Malers Anton Peschka for $11.4 million. That work dates to 1909, as does Danaë.
