Gewitterberg (Kapelle auf dem Kreuzberg bei Krumau)

'Gewitterberg (Kapelle auf dem Kreuzberg bei Krumau)' — 'Thunderstorm Mountain (Chapel on the Kreuzberg near Krumau)' — from 1910 demonstrates Schiele's engagement with the landscape around Krumau (now Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic), his mother's hometown. The town and its surroundings held biographical weight for Schiele: he retreated there in 1910–11 to work away from Vienna, and the Czech border landscape became one of the visual vocabularies he would return to throughout his career. The small chapel perched on a hill against a stormy sky places the work within a tradition of Northern European landscape painting that associated elevated architecture with spiritual precariousness — the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich tradition filtered through Schiele's Expressionist sensibility. But where Friedrich sought sublimity through careful observation, Schiele seeks psychological intensity through compression and distortion: the hill is too steep, the sky too immediately present, the chapel too vulnerable. The Kreuzberg (Cross Mountain) carries obvious religious associations that Schiele neither endorses nor dismisses but uses as a vehicle for existential mood. The painting dates from the same year as his most radical early figure works, demonstrating that his Expressionist rewriting of conventional imagery extended equally to landscape.

Oil on canvas with emphatic contour definition even in the landscape elements — a direct transposition of Schiele's figure-drawing approach to natural forms. The hill is built up with gestural paint strokes that follow its slopes, while the sky uses looser, more atmospheric handling. Colour temperature contrasts dramatise the storm light.