House wall (window wall)

In 1914 Schiele painted the front of a house and nothing else. There is no sky, no street and no neighbouring building, only a narrow strip of path along the bottom edge to show where the ground is. The wall is roughly plastered and full of cracks, and he worked his paint so that it looks and feels like plaster, laid on thick. Two long bands of roof shingles cut across it, each shingle a separate stroke. The windows follow no plan. Some are open, some shut, and each has its own colours, a red frame here, a blue pane there. The Belvedere thinks the house probably stood in Krumau, the small Bohemian town he returned to more than once. Before 1917 the canvas went to the Viennese painter Hans Böhler, bought or swapped, and in 1948 the museum bought it from him in New York.