Apple Tree II

Apple Tree II (1916) belongs to the sustained series of square-format landscape paintings Klimt produced at the Attersee, the alpine lake in Upper Austria where he spent summers with Emilie Flöge and her family from the late 1890s through 1916. Klimt's landscape practice was deliberately separated from his Viennese studio work: he painted outdoors using a square canvas format he adopted after 1900, working through binoculars to compress depth and flatten the pictorial field into an all-over tapestry of marks. The apple tree as subject appears across multiple canvases, reflecting Klimt's Post-Impressionist interest — drawn from Cézanne and Van Gogh — in the individual tree as a motif for structural and chromatic exploration. Unlike his figure paintings, the landscapes contain no gold and minimal ornament; their power comes from the dense, uniform handling of paint across the entire surface, so that foliage, sky, and earth are woven into a continuous fabric. Late landscapes like Apple Tree II show increasing confidence in this all-over approach, the branches and fruit rendered with a jewel-like intensity that echoes the decorative mosaic logic of his figure paintings without replicating their explicit materials.

Oil on canvas in Klimt's characteristic square format, with paint applied in short, dense strokes of roughly equal size across the entire picture surface. The technique creates a mosaic-like flatness: spatial recession is suggested through colour temperature shifts rather than perspective, with cooler blues receding and warm reds advancing among the foliage.