Melo II

Klimt painted this in 1916, in the middle of the war, though nothing in it says so. He made his landscapes only in the summer, on long holidays beside the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian Alps, and he liked them square. To find a composition he would look through a small cardboard frame, cropping the view until a single tree filled the canvas from edge to edge. There is almost no sky and no distance here. The blossoms and leaves press up flat against the surface like a woven tapestry, the same decorative pattern-making he used on his gold portraits. Klimt died two years later, in 1918, and quiet gardens like this are among the last things he painted.