Isla en el Attersee

Klimt is remembered for gold and portraits, but almost every landscape he made came out of a single lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut. From 1898 he spent his summers on the Attersee with the Flöge family, and it was there, away from Vienna, that he first painted outdoors. This is one of those summer canvases, and it is nearly all water. A thin strip of island sits at the very top; everything below is surface, worked in flecks of blue, green and pale yellow until the reflections break into pattern. He painted it around 1901, in the same years his ceiling allegories for the University of Vienna were being publicly denounced as ugly and obscene. He used a square canvas here, a format he kept almost entirely for these lake pictures and rarely used anywhere else.