Park at Kammer Castle

Klimt made this in 1909 during one of his summers on the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut where he spent nearly every holiday of his later life. Away from the gold portraits he painted in Vienna, he turned here to quiet landscapes, and he liked to work them in a perfect square. He is thought to have used a telescope or a small viewfinder to pick out a patch of the park at Kammer Castle, which pulls the trees close and presses them flat against the surface, so the avenue reads almost as a screen of green rather than a path leading back. There are no people in it. These summer landscapes were how Klimt rested between the demanding society commissions that paid his way.