Stein on the Danube, Seen from the South (Large)

Stein on the Danube, Seen from the South (Large) was painted in 1913, when Schiele made the Lower Austrian town of Stein an der Donau a recurring landscape subject. After his traumatic imprisonment at Neulengbach and his subsequent relocation, Schiele developed an intense relationship with the landscape of the Wachau — the Danube valley stretch between Melk and Krems that is one of Austria's most visually distinctive regions. Stein sits adjacent to Krems, and its dense medieval townscape of tightly packed rooftops, church towers, and riverside facades offered Schiele exactly the compressed, interlocking architecture he favoured. Unlike the Impressionist tradition of landscape as atmospheric experience, Schiele treated townscapes as quasi-organic forms — each building a cell in a collective body. There is no sky in these compositions; the town fills the picture plane entirely, as if pressing against the canvas edges. The Neue Galerie Graz's collection of Schiele landscapes reflects the institutional recognition, even during his lifetime, of the artist's radical rethinking of what landscape painting could mean in an expressionist context.

Painted on canvas with a high viewpoint that flattens spatial recession, individual buildings are rendered as angular colour blocks with minimal shading. The palette moves between earthy ochres and desaturated greens, unifying the diverse architectural surfaces into a single tonal field.