Country House at the Attersee

This picture has entered the Belvedere in Vienna twice. Klimt painted it in the summer of 1914 at Weissenbach, at the southern end of the Attersee, and it shows the forester's lodge he rented there, seen across a meadow crowded with flowers between two dark bushes. Its first owner was Jenny Steiner, a Viennese collector. When she had to flee in 1938, the Nazis seized the painting, and in 1940 it was auctioned at the Dorotheum, Vienna's great auction house. By 1963 it belonged to Emma Danziger, who left it to the Belvedere in 1994. Seven years later, following the advice of Austria's art restitution board, the museum returned it to Steiner's heirs, and in 2003 it was sold at Sotheby's in New York. In 2018 its private owner lent it back to the museum for the long term, and it went on show in the Upper Belvedere, in the same room as The Kiss.