Description
Egon Schiele – Houses on the River (The Old Town), 1914
This hand-painted Egon Schiele painting, Houses on the River (The Old Town), is an oil reproduction of the work he painted in 1914. The original is held by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
A town at the water
The scene shows a dense rank of houses pressed against one another above a still river. Schiele returned repeatedly to Krumau (Český Krumlov), his mother’s birthplace, and painted it from a raised vantage point from which the roofs and façades fold into an almost unbroken wall.
A composition with no sky
The picture is built in horizontal bands: a dark ridge along the top, the packed fabric of the town beneath it, then sand and the broad, quiet plane of water that takes the lower third. There is virtually no sky; the eye has nowhere to escape upward and stays pinned to the houses.
Windows like faces
In the façades the windows are painted as dark, empty rectangles set in uneven rows. Nobody is present. It is precisely the absence of figures that gives the town the character of a living organism looking back, rather than a stage set.
The original’s medium and format
The original is oil on canvas, 100 × 120.5 cm (inv. 739 / 1978.81) — a landscape canvas, today in Madrid.
Our hand-painted oil reproduction
Our reproduction is hand-painted in oils on canvas and we paint it in the size you choose.
