Egon Schiele:
Landscape (Ruins of Weitenegg) (Landschaft [Ruine Weitenegg]), 1916
Gouache and pencil on paper
29.2 x 45.6 cm
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2010 for £1,127,650
(Kallir d1864)

Military authorities stationed Egon Schiele near Mühling in the summer of 1916. He documented the architectural ruins of Castle Weitenegg during a Sunday excursion with his wife Edith on 2 July. This specific gouache served as a direct preparatory study for a subsequent studio painting that remains lost to art historians.

Echoes of a Wartime Sunday

Schiele combined pencil lines with washes of gouache to record the historic site. Documentation shows that this sheet remains one of three surviving studies of the Danube location, alongside two basic crayon sketches. The army command limited his studio time, making weekend excursions essential for his creative output. His deployment restricted his access to canvases, which caused a shift toward smaller works on paper. The scenery offered a temporary release from his military post at the Mühling prisoner-of-war camp, located between Vienna and Linz.

The Blueprint of a Lost Canvas

Schiele wrote notes onto his sketches to lock in his visual impressions. His text tracked precise coloristic elements, from the stone of the castle to figures and boats on the water. These descriptions served as a map for an oil composition that later disappeared from the historical record. His diary entry from 14 July 1916 confirms that he painted the landscape with the ruins shortly after his visit. No archival registry contains records of the canvas dimensions or its subsequent ownership lineage.

The provenance of the work links back to the Viennese workshop of Fritz Lampl, whose collector stamp remains marked on the reverse side of the paper. The piece travelled through British and American hands before its public presentation in Manhattan. The Galerie St. Etienne exhibited the landscape in the winter of 1984.