Houses by the Sea

'Houses by the Sea' from 1914 is unusual within Schiele's landscape output, which was predominantly focused on the inland towns of Austria and Bohemia. A coastal subject implies either a trip to the Adriatic — then the southern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — or possibly a Dutch or North Sea coastal locale. The year 1914 was catastrophic in political terms, with the assassination at Sarajevo in June and the outbreak of war in August, and Schiele was subject to military service from 1915 onwards. The sea introduces a spatial openness that contrasts with the compressed, claustrophobic quality of most of his townscapes. Houses by the sea occupy a traditional genre going back to the Dutch Golden Age, and Schiele reinterprets it with his characteristic flatness and psychological attention: the houses are still rendered with that slight wrongness — lean, unease — that characterises all his architectural subjects. The horizontal expanse of sea or coastal water provides a different kind of pictorial challenge than the compact hill towns, and Schiele appears to have found in the coastal light a chromatic richness that informs the more varied palette of the work. The Leopold Museum's collection provides the context for understanding this as part of Schiele's broad engagement with place as psychological territory.

Oil on canvas with Schiele's flattening compositional approach applied to an unusually open horizontal subject. The sea provides a chromatic register of blues and greys that counters the warm earth tones of the buildings. Paint handling varies between the architectural passages, where brushwork is more deliberate, and the water areas, which are handled more freely.