Häuser in Unterach am Attersee

Klimt made this around 1916, on one of the long summers he spent on the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian mountains, while the First World War ground on elsewhere. Landscapes were his holiday work, and he approached them oddly. He liked to look through a small telescope or a cut-out viewfinder, which flattened the distance and let him pack a whole scene into a tight square canvas. Here the lakeside houses at Unterach press right up to the surface, their tiled roofs and windows dissolving into the green around them until the built and the growing things interlock. He painted only a few more summers like this one. Klimt died early in 1918, two years after finishing it.