After the Rain

In August 1898 Klimt spent his first summer holiday in the Salzkammergut, the lake country east of Salzburg, staying for several weeks at Sankt Agatha, a village near the Hallstätter See. He painted four landscapes there, and this is one of them, an orchard still wet from a shower, with thin trunks and hens pecking their way across the grass. The canvas is twice as tall as it is wide. The museum points to two sources for its look, the soft, quick brushwork of the French Impressionists and the Japanese woodblock prints that inspired him. In the grass there are small pink flowers, and in one corner his name in capital letters. In 1900 this became the first of his works to enter the collection that is now the Belvedere, three years before the Moderne Galerie opened in the Lower Belvedere.