Portrait of Wally

Egon Schiele - Portrait of Wally - 1912 - Oil on panel - 32,7 × 39,8 cm (approx. 13 x 16.8 in) Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria (click photo for larger image)Valerie "Wally" Neuzil met  Egon Schiele (1890-1918) in Vienna, in 1911, when she was 17 and he was 21 years old. Wally was a model for a number of Schiele's most striking paintings. They were introduced by Gustav Klimt. Wally had been Klimt’s mistress before she got together with Schiele. Wally and Schiele were a couple from 1911 to 1915. The relationship ended when he decided to marry Edith Harms, for her money, in 1915.  Schiele’s most famous work, “A Portrait of Wally” had been owned by Lea Bondi Jaray, who was fleeing the German annexation of Austria and the Aryanization program. Bondi had given up the painting, under duress, to art dealer Friedrich Welz, in 1939. Welz had seen the painting in Bondi's apartment, where it was part of her private collection, and demanded that she turn it over to him. As they were to be fleeing the country any day, Lea’s husband persuaded her to turn the painting over to Welz. Welz also forced Dr. Heinrich Rieger to sell his collection of Schiele paintings, before Rieger was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died. After years of battling over the painting’s ownership, the Leopold Museum and the Bondi estate agreed upon a settlement of $19 million, in July 2012. Many of these cases still remain open today.