Egon Schiele usually carried a small sketchbook with him, jotting down his compositional ideas and other personal notions on the go. This facsimile edition provides unusual insight into the artist's mind and working methods. Twenty-two of these small-scale sketchbooks belonging to Schiele are known to have survived. Most of them are now preserved in the Egon Schiele Archiv of the Albertina in Vienna. Others are in the collections of the Wiener Stadt- and Landesbibliothek (Vienna City Library), in that of the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (Historical Museum of Vienna), and in private hands. The sketchbook reproduced here is from the Serge Sabarsky Collection, New York. The original sketchbook, which dates from 1910-1913, includes a number of important paintings from this period. In addition to the numerous drawings relating to Schiele's artistic oeuvre, there are several architectural sketches among the pages. There are also fashion sketches, including one for a tunic in the style favored by Schiele's mentor Gustav Klimt. Other pages contain miscellaneous notations, addresses, and calculations.
