Left: my tracing. Right: Egon Schiele,
Pflaumenbaum,
1909–10, oil on canvas, 57 × 50 cm, Hessisches Landesmuseum
Darmstadt — public domain.
Okay, this is Egon Schiele — I’ve never seen this before. It’s a beautiful drawing of a tree, a flower, a plant. I’ve never traced of something like this. There’s a lot of detail up top where the flowers are, and the bark has this textural, stained-glass quality. I don’t think my tracing this silhouette is going to get anywhere near this level of beauty, but it’ll give me something, the exterior. I have traced Schiele’s famous women many times before, but not since starting the blog. I had no idea he made this kind of gorgeous plant work, and found it so interesting — yet still so recognizably linked to how he draws the lines of the women, their edges, limbs. It’s so striking, yet has the sense of Schiele — the control of space is so clear and powerful, just as in his famous works. An autumnal, melancholic quality immediately comes out at us.
Starting with the negative spaces, like always. Schiele’s precise here — these lines inside the tree, fibers, I like the wiry-ness of it. That’s what makes this an educational tracing exercise — it’s such an unusual picture. The branches especially — I love the branches, particularly on the right, where there’s real thickness to them, that beautiful angular quality.
There’s this long branch or fiber on the left, so special because the thickness varies so much along its length — hard to get that with a single fine line, so will need two lines instead of one. There seems to be a leaf hanging off the lower-left branch, or maybe a dangling stem. And then this chunk of plant at the bottom center, and a bit more at the upper right — which ties into what I think is one of the real strengths of this drawing: Schiele’s usual expressivity with white space, the negative space doing as much as the line.
One confusing bit: the plant in the middle reads clearly, but that graceful twig on the left, with its varying thickness, could easily be misread as a wide trunk coming off the side — which it isn’t. Using two lines there instead of one gets that across correctly. The original has these gorgeous shapes throughout the bark and the leaves, dark orange, and I thought about going back in with brush pens for that — but I’ll leave it. It came out better, different, than I expected already. For me it’s settled — I feel the pen is not for that. Schiele’s technique is beautiful, and eventually I may learn in those directions, but currently I am interested in silhouette, perspective, white space, emptiness, implicitness.
Background. Pflaumenbaum (“Plum Tree”), 1909–1910, oil on canvas, 57 × 50 cm, is an early Egon Schiele landscape/still-life study — he was about nineteen or twenty, a couple of years before the figure work he’s best known for. In the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (Hessian State Museum Darmstadt), Germany. Falls in the period right after Schiele broke from the Vienna Academy’s more conventional training and started developing the angular, wiry line that would define his later portraits — visible here already in how the branches and bark are handled, even in a straightforwardly botanical subject.
Auction context. Schiele’s auction record is Häuser mit bunter Wäsche, Vorstadt II (Houses with Laundry, Suburb II), a Krumau cityscape, at £24.7M ($39.6M) at Sotheby’s London, June 2011. That’s a major painting, not a close comp for a piece like this. For scale on smaller/lesser works: Knabe im Matrosenanzug (Boy in a Sailor Suit), a 1914 drawing restituted to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum (a cabaret performer whose collection was looted by the Nazis), sold for £3.3M ($4.2M) at Christie’s London, March 2025 — still well into seven figures, but a different tier entirely from the cityscape record. Pflaumenbaum itself, an early museum-held work, isn’t going anywhere.
Image credits. Egon Schiele died in 1918 — public domain (life + 70 and beyond). The reproduction is a faithful flat image of a public-domain 2-D artwork and carries no separate copyright of its own (US: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, 1999; EU: Copyright Directive 2019, Art. 14). Source photograph via the Yorck Project (2002), 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.
Links
- Pflaumenbaum (Egon Schiele 054) — Wikimedia Commons — full painting, license
- Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt
- Egon Schiele — Wikipedia
- Process video — YouTube