Castle Kammer at Attersee IV

Around the end of August 1910 Klimt wrote from the Attersee to his friend the collector Fritz Waerndorfer. He was working harder than ever, he said, but always on Stoclet, meaning the mosaic frieze he was designing for the Brussels mansion of the banker Adolphe Stoclet. He had not begun a single landscape, and that was costing him a lot of money. The letter bears on this canvas. Catalogues date it to 1910, or to 1909 or 1910, while the Belvedere in Vienna, which owns other views of this castle, now leans towards the summer of 1909. The yellow paint of the walls is so thin that the pencil or black chalk drawing of the shutters and window ornaments shows through it. Only part of the castle's south wing and its gateway is in view, above the still lake that fills the lower half of the square. The Vienna dealer Galerie Miethke sold it in November 1911, shortly after Klimt handed it over.