Beech Grove I

This canvas came to Dresden in 1912. The city's gallery bought it that year from the Great Art Exhibition held in Dresden, through the Miethke gallery in Vienna, with money from a private foundation. Klimt painted it around 1902, during one of his summer stays on the Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, and by his own account he painted a small beech wood there, in sunshine, with a few conifers mixed in. The German title, Buchenwald, means beech wood, though the museum's curators read the trees in this picture as probably young birches and aspens. The horizon sits so high that almost no sky shows, and the rows of trunks come forward toward the viewer from far back in the wood. Fallen leaves, blotched bark and patches of sunlight merge into one flickering surface, and down in the lower right corner, among the leaves, Klimt signed his name in capitals.