A single orange house stands out above all other buildings in Schiele’s image of an old section of a small Austrian town. Painted using an elevated perspective, the overlapping roofs, gables, and chimneys are transformed into clustered conglomerations of interwoven forms that are readable as houses only after sustained observation. Pressed closely together, they obscure any view of city streets. No people populate this darkened place. However, the single bright building in the upper left seems to have eyes that eerily return our gaze. As early as 1918, a critic noted the anthropomorphic quality of Schiele’s townscapes, complaining there was “something grimacing, something of caricature” in these melancholic works. While Schiele was a prolific landscape painter, his short career is most often associated with intimate portraits, self-portraits, and erotic images suggestive of the fin-de-siècle Vienna.