Forêt de sapins I

In 1901 Klimt's Medicine went on show at the Secession in Vienna, 87 university professors signed a petition against it, and a question about the commission was put to parliament. That summer he was on the Attersee in Upper Austria, on holiday with the Floge family, painting trees. He made his landscapes square, a format almost nobody else was using, and picked his motifs through a viewfinder and sometimes an opera glass, cropping a patch of forest out of the view the way a photographer would. Fir Wood I was followed within the same year by a second canvas of nearly the same stand of trees. He painted around 50 landscapes in all, close to a quarter of his output, and almost every one of them on a summer holiday by a lake.