Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

In the small provincial Austrian town of Neulengbach in April 1912, Egon Schiele was arrested and imprisoned on charges of public immorality and of corrupting a minor. These charges and the eleven days he spent in the town prison there before being released were to mark the young artist profoundly. While in prison, Schiele had been allowed to draw, and in addition to recording his wretched immediate surroundings he had also turned his mind to happier times, drawing and painting from memory the little fishing boats that he had seen in the harbour on a series of visits to Trieste with his sister Gerti. On his release from prison, shaken and fearful, Schiele began to travel sporadically, visiting familiar places like Trieste once again and also new ones like Lake Constance, now longing, he said, to see free people and to begin a new life (Schiele, quoted in J. Kallir, Egon Schiele Drawings and Watercolours, London, 2003, p. 195).

Executed at this time, Drei Ruderboote (Three Rowing Boats) is a gouache deriving from this period of transition in Schieles life when, although artistically at the height of his powers, he felt outcast, victimised, and shaken. As he had done in prison, he often sought to comforting subjects in many of his drawings and watercolours at this time, returning in a series of pictures of fishing boats to one of the central themes of his youth. It seems likely, therefore, that he also drew comfort from the opportunity to paint these rowing boats bobbing on the surface of the waves, either in the harbour at Trieste, or more likely perhaps, moored along the shores of Lake Constance.