Castle Kammer at Attersee III

Around 1908 the industrialist Anton Gassauer bought Schloss Kammer, a castle standing out in the water of the Attersee in Upper Austria, and began renovating it. Klimt spent his summers from 1908 to 1912 in a villa close by and painted the castle five times. Here he looked at its south wing from the far side of a small bay, almost 200 metres away, probably through opera glasses or a telescope. That zoom flattens everything, so the trees, the yellow wall, the roof and the reflections in the lake read as one patterned surface.

The roofs also help date the picture. Postcards show the castle's grey roofs being re-covered in red around 1910, the main building first. In this canvas the big roof behind is already red while the low wing in front is still grey, one reason the Belvedere now places it in 1911 or 1912 rather than the 1910 given in older books. It came to the museum in 1936 as a gift in the name of the sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and his late wife Adele, whom Klimt had painted twice.