Lakeshore with Birches

For more than a century, this lake shore belonged to one family and almost nobody else knew it. In early 1902 Klimt showed it at the 13th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, and a photograph of that show catches it hanging beside his other work. The same year Richard and Klara Koenigs, a collector couple, bought it at an exhibition in Düsseldorf, and in 1903 they gave it to their daughter Martha as a wedding present. There it stayed, out of sight of scholars. The catalogue of Klimt's paintings published in 2007 does not list it. When it came up at Sotheby's in London in February 2012, the case for it rested on that old exhibition photograph, a letter of 1901 in which Klimt mentions the landscapes he was working on, and an infrared scan that found a preparatory drawing under the paint.