Castle Kammer at Attersee III (Schloss Kammer am Attersee III)

Castle Kammer at Attersee III, painted around 1910, belongs to the sustained series of landscapes Klimt made at the Attersee, the lake in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria where he spent his summers from 1900 onward. Klimt made over fifty landscape paintings across his career — almost exclusively during these summer retreats — and the Attersee inspired more canvases than any other location. He typically worked outdoors with a square format canvas, a deliberate choice that eliminated landscape convention's traditional horizontal emphasis and created a more compressed, pattern-like surface. Schloss Kammer, the eighteenth-century baroque manor on the Attersee's shore, appears in at least four distinct paintings, each exploring a different relationship between architecture, water, and light. By 1910 Klimt's landscape approach had fully absorbed the lessons of Post-Impressionism, especially the mosaic-like colour fragmentation associated with Divisionism and the flattening of pictorial space influenced by Japanese art. These landscapes were rarely exhibited during his lifetime and sold almost exclusively to private Viennese collectors, unlike the portraits that generated his public reputation.

The square canvas is densely filled with horizontal bands of reflected water and vertical architecture, both rendered with small, distinct dabs and patches of colour that create a shimmering, near-pointillist surface. The castle's reflection in the Attersee dissolves its solidity into abstract colour sequences.