When he was sixteen years old, Egon Schiele painted Landscape of a Meadow with Houses in oil on a rectangular cut of cardboard. A little higher than the landscape’s horizontal center a thick band of green, unevenly applied in a gently undulating motion, cuts across the scene from the left, where the paint is thickest, to right, where it has run thin and dry, though it is still thicker than the marks of rubbed-down greens and browns which fill the lower half of the painting. Above the thick green line — grass hills — three couplings of houses are positioned, surrounded and separated from one another with small swoops of deep and hardly differentiated shades of purples, reds, and greens — trees. The sides of the houses are rendered in rich sheets of whites tinged lightly with either blues, pinks, or purples. Cardboard does not absorb oil paint as avidly as canvas or paper (which slurps oils down to a dim, flat mark) and so the walls of the buildings are raised up, the heavily applied paint has dried thick and the volume contrasts pleasingly with the flat wisps of surrounding trees. Behind this layer of incident, a larger building separates this strip from a band of pale purple markings which fills the canvas from left to right — a body of water, delicately rendered, a whisper lighter than the whitish blues of sky that reach the top of the painting.
The Eternal Childhood of Egon Schiele
