Egon Schiele’s Birthplace

Welcome home, Egon! Enter the Schiele family’s apartment.

The newly done rooms in the Egon Schiele’s birthplace provide authentic insights into events in the childhood of this exceptional artist. As the son of the station master Alfred Schiele, Egon spent more than ten years in Tulln from 1890 on. These years shaping his artistic work in significant ways.

The individual rooms in the station apartment are furnished in the authentic style of fin de siècle Austria. They tell numerous stories about the Schiele family’s rise and fall via sound bays and a modern audio system. Original pieces of furniture from around 1900 reconstruct the character of a middle-class home, giving visitors a vivid feel for what life was like in that period.

Egon Schiele and His Time in Tulln

Egon Schiele grew up in a railroad family and spent more than a third of his life living in his father’s station master apartment in the Tulln train station. Schiele was born on June 12, 1890, to Adolf and Marie Schiele as their third child. He spent a carefree childhood as the station master’s son. In Tulln, young Schiele experienced first-hand the undreamt-of intensity of the new phenomenon of mobility. His early drawings as a child attest to his keen interest in railroads.

This openness and interest in progress and technology laid ideal groundwork for a future representative of the artistic avant-garde. When Schiele began secondary school in Krems and Klosterneuburg and then set off for Vienna for a great career as an artist, he took with him the formative experiences he had had as a child.

Internationally Significant Artists

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was one of the key visual artists of Viennese Modernism along with Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. He was born on June 12, 1890, at the train station of Tulln an der Donau.

By age ten, he was already showing remarkable talent for painting. This gift was encouraged from the outset and the young genius took and passed the admission examination to the Academy at the earliest possible date. Egon Schiele died of the Spanish flu on October 30, 1918, not long after turning 28. His oeuvre at this time already totaled 3,000 works of art. On his deathbed he expressed the conviction that his pictures would one day hang in all the great museums of the world and he was proven right.

On inserting a 2 euro coin, visitors gain admission to the apartment and can experience Schiele family life at their own pace with the help of a myriad of media and endearing details.

Public arrival is easily accessible by train or bus.