Château au bord de l'eau

Klimt is remembered for gold and for portraits, but for 16 summers he escaped Vienna for Lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut, and there he painted landscapes with no people in them at all. He liked to work from a boat, or looking straight across the water, which flattened the far shore into pattern. This is the first of four views he made of Schloss Kammer, the manor across the lake, its walls and trees doubled in the still surface below. He painted it on a square canvas, as he did with nearly all these summer pictures. In 1910 the young National Gallery in Prague bought it off the wall of an exhibition at the Rudolfinum for 500 crowns, one of the earliest Klimts to enter a public collection.