Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer

Almost every summer Klimt left Vienna for the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian mountains, and there he painted landscapes, the quiet counterweight to the gold-leaf portraits that had made him rich and notorious in the city. In 1912 he settled near Schloss Kammer, a castle at the water's edge, and painted the avenue of trees leading up to it. They crowd the square canvas and press almost flat against the surface, their foliage broken into small dabs of green, so the path seems to tip up toward you rather than recede into distance. He often studied such views through a kind of telescope to isolate one patch of the scene. He was 50 that year, and landscapes like this were what he made away from commissions, for himself.