Schönbrunner Landschaft

Klimt is remembered for gold and glamour, the shimmering portraits of Viennese women. But he spent a good part of most years painting quiet square landscapes, and this is one of his last, from 1916. The subject is the park of Schonbrunn, the vast summer palace of the Habsburg emperors on the edge of Vienna. He made it in the third year of the First World War. That autumn the old emperor Franz Joseph died after 68 years on the throne, and within two more years both Klimt and the empire that had laid out this garden were gone. None of that unease shows here. He gives you only the trees and the still, formal green of an imperial park in high summer.