No one modelled for Schiele as often as he himself did, and his series of self-portraits constitute by far the most profound and expressive part of his oeuvre.

Schiele's self-portraiture, in particular -- a theme he pursued with almost manic obsessiveness -- is the reflection of a process which exhausts all the possibilities of bodily expression.... Schiele was fascinated by the complex of relationships between inner experience and its external manifestation. The depiction of the body encompassed for him, the whole range of formal possibilities that were suggested by his experience of himself and his fellow creatures." (P. Werkner, "Body Language Form and Expression in Austrian Expressionist Painting", Egon Schiele and his Contemporaries, Vienna, 1989, p. 35).

Even in his earliest studies from 1910, Schiele takes the expressive potential of gestures and poses to an extreme. Self-caricature and self-contortion are the prominent features of these works, in which the artist reveals a multitude of selves ranging from the tragic to the narcissistic. Their impact is immediate:

Schiele owned a large, black-framed mirror that he dragged
from studio to studio throughout his life and referred to when
drawing himself. This mirror gave his self-portraits a direct,
no-nonsense quality. The artist usually squatted or stood; one
can imagine that his feet (not always visible) were firmly
planted on the ground; his head was up; straight on or cocked
sideways. The viewer looks at Schiele much as he must have looked
at himself, and the sheet represents more or less exactly the
space in which he posed. (J. Kallir, Egon Schiele,
op. cit., p. 122).

While exploring his psyche, Schiele nonetheless always remains conscious of the image he is presenting to the public; he is object as well as subject. In 1910 he painted himself as a "Self-Seer;" from which evolved a series of self-portraits where he posed as poet, hermit, prophet and martyr, often cloaked as if to signify membership in a quasi-religious sect. All of these self-portraits provide powerful insight into the artist's character; fixing the outside world with a truculent stare, a despairing or forbidding look, or even a grimace, Schiele challenges the viewer. The present painting, with its hypnotic gaze is a particularly fine example of this. His haunted gaze in this work clearly illustrates how much more tragic and pained Schiele's view of himself became after his imprisonment in 1912. His haggard stance here is not dissimilar to Self-Portrait as Saint Sebastian (Kallir no. D 1658), 1914, where he depicts himself with arms outstretched, mortally wounded by arrows.

Schiele gradually abandoned the cloaks and caftans found in his
work of 1911-1913, but shorter tunics or jerkins remained an
important adjunct to his allegorical iconography. (For Self-
portrait in Jerkin with Right Elbow Raised, he actually wore a
sleeveless vest, which was filled in only when the drawing was
colored.) As the artist's costumes became briefer and less
constraining, his movements became freer. Though the self-
portraits of 1914-15 may not be quite as contorted as those of
1910-11, Schiele's fascination with expressive body language
had scarcely diminished. If anything his gestures had become
more carefully calibrated and thereby more potent.

Given Schiele's penchant for minimalist compositions, gesture
is key to his allegorical oil paintings, defining the way figures
related to one another and to the picture plane. Self-Portrait
in Jerkin with Right Elbow Raised is not a study for any known
oil, though it may be considered a sort of dress rehearsal. Schiele was practicing his repertoire of poses, seeking out those moves
that would work best in a larger context. (Ibid., p. 136)