Litzlberg on the Attersee

For years Gustav Klimt spent his summers on the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut, and he liked to paint its far shore from a small boat, which flattens the water and the trees into one dense tapestry. This view of the hamlet of Litzlberg dates from around 1914, one of his last summers there before he died early in 1918. Look at how little sky he allows himself. The whole surface is given over to reflections and foliage, packed edge to edge the way he packed gold into his portraits. After Klimt's death the painting passed to Amalie Redlich, a Jewish collector in Vienna. The Nazis seized it, she was deported and killed, and in 2011 a Salzburg museum returned the picture to her grandson.