During his short life, the Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) made just 17 prints before his death from influenza at the age of 28.
A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. Four years after his death, Otto Nirenstein, an art dealer and founder of the Verlad Neuer Graphik, the fine arts division of publisher Rikola Verlag, acquired all of Schiele’s original etching plates, including the right to publish them. The posthumously published portfolio The Graphic Work of Egon Schiele followed, containing six prints published in 1922, each from an edition of 80.