Still Water

When the Vienna Secession opened its first exhibition in March 1898, the Belgian painter Khnopff was one of its foreign stars, with 21 works on show, and the young Viennese artists studied him closely. This canvas from 1894 shows what they saw. It is long and low, twice as wide as it is tall, and more than half of it is water. The trees on the far bank stand in a loose row with their crowns cut off by the top edge, so the eye drops to the pond, where the same trunks hang upside down in the dark surface. Nothing moves. Khnopff also called it the Ménil Pond. Klimt scholars name it as the direct model for Klimt's A Morning by the Pond of 1899, his first landscape on a square canvas, now also in Vienna at the Leopold Museum.