Tightly packed houses with dark brown roofs and pale walls crowd together like a rock floating in blackish-blue water. Small dark windows dot the walls, a line of washing hangs near the top right, and no people appear anywhere. The signature "EGON SCHIELE 1911." stands out in the dark at the upper right of the small panel. Egon Schiele painted Krumau (Český Krumlov) in Bohemia, his mother's birthplace, looking down from the castle plateau onto the houses in the bend of the Vltava.

The Dead City motif first appeared in 1910, during his first long stay there with his friends Erwin Osen and Anton Peschka. He called this panel, painted in oil and opaque color on wood, the one with the "most serious colors," and the Leopold Museum reads the Dead City as an allegory of loneliness and isolation. The museum's provenance names Arthur Roessler, Alfred Spitzer and Fritz Grünbaum among its early owners. It passed through dealers in Bern and New York in the 1950s, and the collector Rudolf Leopold owned it from 1958 until 1994, when it went to the Leopold Museum foundation.

It is in the Leopold Museum in Vienna.