Malcesine am Gardasee

Klimt spent the summer of 1913 beside Lake Garda in northern Italy, and painted the little town of Malcesine rising from the water, its houses packed into one dense, glittering hillside. Landscapes like this were his holidays from portraits, worked up in a nearly square format and often studied through a telescope from a boat. What makes this one hard to describe is that no one alive has seen it. In May 1945, as the war ended, the painting was among a group of Klimts stored in Schloss Immendorf, a castle north of Vienna that was set on fire by retreating SS troops. It survives only in old photographs. The colour of that crowded little town on the slope can now only be guessed at.