About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
*After the Rain* — also known as *Garden with Chickens in St. Agatha* — is a landscape painted in oil on canvas in 1899, measuring a notably vertical 80.3 × 40 cm. That narrow, portrait-like format amplifies the scene's quiet depth: a wide meadow of cool green grass slopes toward the horizon, trees scatter the middle ground with dark brown barks and flourishing canopies, and chickens swarm the foreground in shades of white, black, and grey.
The birds are loosely dissolved into the grass — more impression than outline — while small yellow flowers punctuate the ground like scattered light.
Above it all, the sky is handled with a soft, sponged technique in deep blue tinged with purple — a chromatic choice that gives the air a peculiar post-storm weight. Rather than celebrating the brightness that typically follows rain, Klimt leans into the melancholy that lingers after a storm — the hush, the dampness, the saturated cool.
The work is thought to have been painted when Klimt stayed in the Goiserer Valley with the Flöge family in the summer of 1898 , and was completed or dated to 1899. By this point, Klimt was president of the Vienna Secession — a role demanding and exhilarating in equal measure — and the rural Austrian landscape offered a genuine counterweight to the intensity of that institutional life. From 1898 forward, Klimt spent his summers in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, where he was able to paint *en plein air* for the first time.
This piece is indicative of Klimt's early landscape work, before he moved towards his more famous figurative and decorative paintings.
Klimt had probably returned to the landscape genre more seriously around 1896 , and works like this one show a painter who is genuinely looking — registering sensation over symbol — in ways that his gilded allegories rarely permit. The painting is held in the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, in Linz, Austria.
On the wall, *After the Rain* asks for space to breathe — it rewards a long corridor, a calm reading room, or a bedroom where natural light enters gently from one side. Its vertical format draws the eye upward through layered greens from meadow to canopy to sky, creating a meditative drift rather than a focal point. The palette — anchored in a cool, expansive range of greens, with a lighter tone for the meadow and deeper hues climbing toward the treeline
