Upper Austrian Farmhouse

Klimt exhibited this picture under one plain word, Farmhouse. It was the art historian Alfred Weidinger who later matched it to a real building at Buchberg, on the north-western shore of the Attersee, pulled down in 1992. In the summer of 1911 Klimt was lodging in a villa beside Schloss Kammer and taking long walks through the country around it. The house was a modest one, built of wood, with low rooms and little windows, the kind poorer families lived in across Upper Austria. Only its ground floor shows. Everything above is swallowed by the crowns of fruit trees, laid down in countless separate dabs, while the boards of the wall keep their clean, straight edges. The larger tree carries small yellow apples or pears, and in the smaller one the Belvedere suspects plums, because of their violet colour.