Orchard

The year is 1907, and Klimt is at the peak of his gold period; he is beginning The Kiss, the picture that would come to stand for him. This orchard belongs to the other half of his life. Every summer he left Vienna for the Attersee, a long lake in the Salzkammergut, and painted the gardens and meadows of the villages around it. He made these landscapes almost as a rest, away from the portrait commissions that paid his bills. To compose one he would look through a small viewfinder of cardboard or ivory, held at arm's length, and cut a square patch out of the scenery, then push the horizon high or off the top edge. The result has almost no sky. What fills the canvas instead is a dense, upright wall of grass, blossom and fruit trees, built from thousands of small dabs of colour that begin to shimmer when you step back. He kept these landscapes square, as tall as they are wide, the shape he reserved for nature.