Pine Forest II

In 1901 Klimt finished Judith, the biblical heroine worked in gold leaf, one of the pictures that made his name in Vienna. The same year, on his summer break from the city, he painted a stand of fir trees twice. This is the second version. Both canvases are almost square, about 90 centimetres a side, and both are filled with trunks from edge to edge. The first, now in the Kamm Collection at the Kunsthaus Zug in Switzerland, opens onto a small clearing. Here the clearing is gone, and the trunks are worked in more detail and packed closer together. Klimt's German title is Tannenwald, which means a fir forest, so the English name Pine Forest is a loose translation that stuck. The painting is in a private collection, and it was lent to the Klimt exhibition held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2001.