Schiele’s sketchbooks that he kept throughout his short life and carried everywhere.

After he died at twenty-eight in 1918, many of his sketchbooks were dismantled and the pages sold off individually for the dealer market. Only thirteen complete books survived intact, all now in Vienna. The earliest, made when he was fourteen, surfaced only recently, in California, brought there in 1938 by a school friend fleeing the Nazis.

Egon Schiele on The Reflective Eye this June.