Egon Schiele

📍Široká 71, 381 01 Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

“I grew up in Tulln, on the Danube, where my father was the stationmaster; I drew trains endlessly as a boy. He became ill and died when I was fourteen. Český Krumlov, the old Bohemian town folded into a tight loop of the Vltava beneath its castle, was my mother's birthplace, and I had loved it since I was a child. In May 1911, at twenty-one, I left Vienna, which I found suffocating, and came here with Wally Neuzil, my model and companion, renting a little garden house above the river. I painted the town's crooked roofs, its tilting houses and dark bends of water — the series I called the Dead City — and many portraits. But the townspeople were scandalised: Wally and I were not married, and I drew young local girls as models. By August we were driven out, and seven years later I was gone, taken by the influenza epidemic at twenty-eight. Yet Krumlov kept something of me: the Egon Schiele Art Centrum now stands in the old brewery in town, a short walk from the river I painted.”

Sources: ckrumlov.info Wikipedia: Wally Neuzil esac.cz