Summer Landscape

Schiele painted Summer Landscape in 1917, working from views of the Wachau valley town of Krumau (now Ceský Krumlov in the Czech Republic), a region associated with his mother's family and one he returned to obsessively throughout his career. By 1917 he had survived a brief imprisonment in 1912 and was navigating an increasingly hostile critical climate in Vienna, yet his landscape work of this period shows a new compositional assurance. The Expressionist tradition in which Schiele worked demanded that colour and line carry psychological charge rather than simply describe a surface, and in this painting the compression of the townscape, its refusal of open space, translates the claustrophobic intensity of a medieval river town into pure pictorial pressure. The work belongs to a series of Krumau views that art historians now regard as among the most original contributions to European Expressionism in the decade before the First World War ended and the Viennese avant-garde began to disperse. Schiele died in October 1918 during the influenza pandemic at twenty-eight, making these mature townscapes among the final sustained bodies of work he produced.