Roseiras sob as árvores

This is the only painting by Klimt in a French public collection, a shimmering wall of green flecked with small blossoms that he made around 1905 near the lake at Attersee, where he spent his summers. Its quiet surface hides a brutal history. By 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, its Viennese owner Nora Stiasny was forced to sell it to a Nazi party member for a fraction of its worth; four years later she was murdered during the Holocaust. The picture changed hands, lost its trail, and entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1980, its origins untangled only much later. In 2021 France announced it would return the painting to Stiasny's heirs. Klimt built the whole canvas from tiny dabs of colour, so from a few steps back the trees dissolve into one soft screen of foliage.