About this work
The painting illustrates a large white church on the shore of the lake , its pale form anchored against the dense greens of the surrounding landscape. The composition is marked by a harmonious balance between the church and its surroundings, with the church's steeple rising prominently against the backdrop of the serene Attersee, creating a sense of verticality that draws the eye upward. True to Klimt's mature approach to landscape, his pointillist style has given way here to a flatter structure — forms are compressed and simplified, architecture and foliage treated with near-equal decorative weight. Brushstrokes laid in several directions create a moving, luxurious path of nature against the flat surface of the landscape, while the water of the lake and the reflections of buildings, trees, and grass are rendered with the same flat, vigorous strokes to produce a beautiful sensation of a dark, moving body of water.
Dated 1916 and executed in oil on canvas, the work belongs to Klimt's late period.
That year marked his last summer sojourn on the quieter southern shore of the Attersee, a retreat he sought increasingly for peace and quiet.
In the summers between 1914 and 1916, Klimt and his companions travelled by steamer from Weissenbach to other villages, including Unterach on the southwestern shore — a journey that inspired three landscapes. Klimt made brush drawings of the scenes and took colour notes at Unterach, or observed it through a powerful telescope from the opposite shore. That telescopic distance is felt in the work: the scene has the compressed, front-on quality of a view seen through a long lens, the world flattened into interlocking planes. Painted during Klimt's final summer at Lake Attersee, the work distils more than a decade of experimentation in the square landscape format.
Created purely for his own pleasure, these bucolic scenes became among his most sought-after pictures and were highly coveted by collectors.
This is a painting that rewards a room with breathing space — a hallway with good natural light, a study, or a sitting room where calm is the point. Klimt favoured square canvases for his landscapes, a radical break with the age-old horizontal format; the effect is an enclosed, focused view of nature rather than a panoramic vista — instead of standing at a distance, viewers are transported to the middle of the scene. It speaks to those drawn to the quieter registers of modernism: the collector who knows Klimt beyond the gold, and appreciates that his restraint could be just as commanding as his opulence. The mood is contemplative — summer stillness held inside a perfect square.
