Church in Cassone

Klimt spent the summer of 1913 at Malcesine on Lake Garda with Emilie Flöge and her family. The village in the picture, Cassone, lies across the water, and he could not get near it, so he worked through a telescope, pressing the far shore flat against the canvas until the houses lock together like tiles. Landscapes he painted square, as he had for years. He made a second Garda view that summer, of Malcesine itself. It was stored during the war at Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, and the castle burned in May 1945 with more than a dozen Klimts inside, which leaves this as the only surviving painting he made of the lake. It belonged to the Viennese industrialist Viktor Zuckerkandl and then to his sister Amalie Redlich, who was deported from Vienna in 1941 and did not come back. After an agreement with her heir it was sold at auction in London in 2010 and is still in private hands.