Melo I

Klimt made this on a summer holiday. For years he took the season off at the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian Alps, and while the family swam and walked he set up a square canvas and painted whatever was close at hand. Here it is a single apple tree, so heavy with red fruit and surrounded by flowers that the sky is almost squeezed out at the top. He worked the whole surface into a dense weave of dots, the same decorative instinct that fills his gold portraits, turned loose on a garden. The square format was his own habit for these views, unusual for landscape then. He painted around 40 of them in his life, nearly all at that one lake.