Description
Egon Schiele – Houses by the Sea, 1914
The hand-painted Egon Schiele painting Houses by the Sea is an oil reproduction of a work from 1914. The original is held by the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
A row of houses with no sea
Despite the title there is no sea in the painting. Five white houses with dark steep roofs stand in a row, side by side, as though someone had lined them up. Below them runs a band of dark green gardens and fences; above them a grey sky combed into horizontals.
Houses as faces
The windows are small, dark and set in regular rows; each house has its own roof colour — brown, red, yellow, oily green. Schiele does not place the houses in space, he stacks them into a plane, so the façades read as a row of faces.
Built in horizontals
The whole painting is built from horizontal bands: sky, roofs, façades, gardens, fences. That rhythm is what gives a quiet scene its tension, because no line retreats into depth.
⭐ The painting’s history: seized in 1938, later settled
In 1922 the work came into the ownership of the Viennese collector Jenny (Eugenie) Steiner. On 3 October 1938 it was seized and distrained by the Nazi authorities, and on 4 February 1941 it was sold at the 463rd auction of the Dorotheum in Vienna as lot 68. After the war it entered Rudolf Leopold’s collection and in 1994 the Leopold Museum Private Foundation. A claim by Jenny Steiner’s heirs was later resolved by settlement. We write this history down because it is part of the work.
Technique and format of the original
The original is painted in oil on canvas, measuring 99.5 × 119.7 cm (inv. LM 452), and hangs today in the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our painter works the reproduction by hand in oil on canvas, in the size you choose. Before delivery you receive a photograph of the painting for approval.
