Horticultural Landscape with a Hilltop (Parish Garden)

In the summer of 1916, the third summer of the First World War, Klimt went back to the Attersee, the lake in Upper Austria where he had spent his summers since 1900. It turned out to be his last stay there, and one of his busiest. He lodged on the quiet southern shore, in the forester's house at Weissenbach, and painted at least five canvases that season, some of them left unfinished. This garden under a hilltop is one of them, and its second title calls it a parish garden. Pale flowers crowd the whole lower part of the picture, and the rounded hill that gives it its name appears only along the top. Like nearly all of Klimt's landscapes it is square, 110 centimetres a side, a format he settled on by studying the view through a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard.