Mother with Two Children II

Mother with Two Children II, from 1915, belongs to the series of maternal subjects Schiele produced around the period of his marriage to Edith Harms in February 1915, shortly before his military conscription. The maternity theme acquired particular urgency in 1915 as Schiele contemplated domesticity, paternity, and mortality simultaneously — he married, was conscripted, and produced several of his most psychologically dense figurative works within months of one another. Schiele's approach to the mother-child subject consistently refused conventional sentimentality: his mothers are burdened, isolated, or psychologically ambiguous figures; his children are rendered with the same searching, unidealised attention as adults. This work in oil on canvas represents the more sustained technical engagement of oil compared to his rapid works on paper. The Leopold Museum's Schiele collection — the most comprehensive anywhere — holds multiple versions of the mother-and-children theme, enabling comparative study of how Schiele's thinking about this subject evolved.

The oil on canvas technique allows Schiele to develop the multi-figure composition with more tonal range than his drawings and panel works. The children's forms are rendered with the same angular economy as the mother, the three bodies creating an interlocked but psychologically separate grouping.