Edith Harms

Edith Harms was six months pregnant when the influenza killed her, and her husband drew her for three days and then died of it too. She was the daughter of a locksmith, respectably middle-class, and lived with her sister Adéle opposite Egon Schiele's studio in Hietzing - which is how they met, since he began waving at the windows. He wrote to a friend that he intended to marry advantageously, though not the model Wally Neuzil he had been living with for four years. He proposed to keep Wally as well and put it to her in writing at a café; she left and never saw him again, and died of scarlet fever nursing at a military hospital in 1917. He married Edith in June 1915 and was called up three days later. She followed him to his postings and he drew her constantly - portraits quite unlike the work that had made his name, without the distortion, sometimes almost tender. The influenza pandemic reached Vienna in the autumn of 1918. She died on 28 October. He made drawings of her as she was dying, the last things he made, and died on 31 October at twenty-eight, three days after her, in her mother's flat. The last drawing is a sketch of her face and it is unfinished. Her sister Adéle claimed decades later to have been his lover as well, which nobody has been able to confirm or refute and which is the sort of claim that attaches itself to a household everyone in has died. The pandemic that killed them both killed more people than the war that had just ended, and in Vienna it arrived in a city already short of coal, food and doctors. The Secession show of that spring had finally made him sellable, and he had three days of it.

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