Schiele's activity as a landscapist increased sharply in the autumn of 1910, once he returned to his home town of Krumau. Schiele called his native town "the dead city", and significantly his townscapes and landscapes from this time are devoid of human life. Nature held great significance for Schiele; he imbued his landscapes with symbolic meaning, with winter representing death, and spring and summer rebirth. He wrote: "I think - I know - that drawing from nature is meaningless as far as I am concerned, because I am better at painting pictures from memory, visions of landscape. What i am mostly looking at now is the physical movement of mountains, water, trees and flowers. Everywhere one is reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar stirrings of joy and suffering in plants.." (ed. K. Schröder & H. Szeemann, Egon Schiele and his Contemporaries, Vienna, 1989, p. 25)
It is thus doubtful that Berg am Fluß with its dark river and striking green sailing boat highlighted against the looming mountain, represents a specific location for the artist, although the river might well be the Vlatava (then called the Moldau) river, as Krumau was built in one of its sharp bends. Krumau grew out of this bend in an island-like configuration, and Schiele would perch on the high left bank, painting the town from above. Certainly in terms of conception Berg am Fluß corresponds to several of Schiele's paintings of Krumau with its flattened forms and austere palette. Jane Kallir observes how, unlike his portraits and figure studies of these years, Schiele's townscapes and landscapes expand to encompass the entire picture plane. They are clearly two-dimensional, the forms described by brushwork rather than volumetric modelling with a surprisingly dense application of pigment. Between 1911 and 1913 Schiele painted a number of little boards, mainly of landscapes, and after this this genre virtually disappears from his oeuvre.