Focus on this artwork and analyze the Analysis.
The Duchess is depicted in half length, standing or perhaps leaning in front of an undefined dark background. She wears an elegant evening gown with a square neckline and a simple pearl choker. Her downturned face has a pensive expression; her features are thin and worn, prematurely aged by the disease ravaging her body. Her right hand holds a handkerchief, her left rests at waist height, contorted into an anatomically impossible position. There is no apparent light source; rather, she appears to glow softly from within.Kokoschka emphasizes the contrast between the Duchess's ravaged body and that lambent inwardness, seeing in her a reflection of "...those aristocratic women who used to seek consolation in their faith, back in the days of religious upheavals when the world was so godless that only mystics still believed in paradise, which they placed in their own hearts." This kind of idealization was a common trope in fin-de-siècle thought - the "consumptive sublime," in which "women enveloped in illness were the visual equivalents of spiritual purity."Kokoschka's contemporaries contrasted the Duchess with Klimt's decorative, glamorous high-society portraits. "Why did I think of Klimt all of a sudden?" Else Lasker-Schüler wrote upon viewing it, "He is a botanist, Kokoschka a  planter. Where Klimt picks a flower, Kokoschka pulls up the plant by the roots."Along with the rest of Kokoschka's early portraits, the Duchess thus marks a departure from the formalized, surface-oriented portraiture then current in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where "representation had adopted a particularly referential position... portraits represented no one; they represent someone as some one else." Instead, "...no one in Kokoschka's early portraits is represented, as the conventions of the times demanded, in a manner befitting social status - not gloriously, charitably, or even realistically." Kokoschka's goal in this was to create "a new kind of psychological portraiture" in which the essence of the subject was isolated and expressed.
Else Lasker-Schüler fin-de-siècle Klimt's left portrait