Pear Tree

Klimt painted most of his landscapes on holiday. This pear tree in full blossom was begun in the summer of 1903 at the Attersee, the Austrian lake where he spent his summers, and finished back in Vienna. He put it on a square canvas rather than the usual wide landscape shape, and he built the tree out of thousands of small separate dabs, each one a leaf or a blossom or a fruit, so the whole surface flickers. That year the Vienna Secession, the artists' group he led, mounted a show that brought works by Monet, Cézanne, Seurat and Van Gogh to the city, and their broken touch turns up here in his own hand. Up close the surface is flat and glittering, closer to a mosaic than to a window onto a garden.