One-Year Volunteer Lance-Corporal
1916
Drafted into the Austrian army during the horrors of World War I, Egon Schiele captured the raw, nervous energy of the era in this 1916 portrait. The figure wears a blue military jacket with a single star on the collar, his face pale and flushed with red patches, peering through wire-rimmed glasses with an intense, almost haunted gaze. Schiele's signature Expressionist style is on full display—the jagged, unfinished lines of the hands and sleeves make the soldier look like he's emerging from the paper itself. Interestingly, Schiele's superiors recognized his genius and reassigned him from combat to painting portraits of prisoners and fellow officers, a twist of fate that kept him alive until the tragic Spanish flu pandemic took him in 1918.