Jardin de ferme aux tournesols

Every summer in the early 1900s Klimt left Vienna for the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian mountains, and spent weeks there with the Floge family. Away from the gold-drenched society portraits he was known for, he painted the countryside. He found this crowded flower bed near a farm on the lakeshore around 1906. To choose his view he would hold up a small square of cardboard, cut like a viewfinder, and frame a patch of garden through it. That is why the picture feels the way it does. There is no horizon and almost no sky, just sunflowers, dahlias and asters pushed right up to the edges, so the deep garden reads as a flat field of pattern. The canvas is a perfect square, 110 centimetres each way, the format he liked best for these summer garden pictures.