Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee

Almost every summer Gustav Klimt left Vienna for the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut, where he stayed with the Floege family and painted woods and water instead of the gold-ground portraits he was known for. This forested slope near the village of Unterach dates from 1916, one of his last summers there. He liked to crowd the whole canvas with the motif, pushing the sky out of the frame so the trees and hillside press right up to the surface, almost like a patterned screen. The square format was his habit for these landscapes. He painted it two years before he died in 1918, still spending his holidays looking hard at a patch of Austrian hillside.