Forester's House in Weissenbach II (Garden)

Forester's House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914) belongs to Klimt's Attersee-region landscape series, painted during summer stays in the Salzkammergut. Weissenbach am Attersee, a small settlement on the western shore of the lake, provided Klimt with the domestic garden subjects that complement his pure forest and lake scenes. The designation 'II' indicates this was a second version of a composition, reflecting Klimt's practice of returning to successful motifs and working through variations — a serial approach that parallels Monet's series paintings of haystacks and cathedrals. By 1914 Klimt's square-format landscapes were at their most confident: the garden setting allowed him to explore the relationship between cultivated space and wild growth, between the geometric enclosure of garden beds and the untamed density of surrounding vegetation. The Neue Galerie, which holds this work, has assembled significant holdings of early twentieth-century Viennese and German art, contextualising Klimt alongside the decorative modernism of his contemporaries. Garden paintings in this period also connect to the broader Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil interest in the garden as a designed environment — Klimt's regular collaborator Emilie Flöge was herself deeply involved in the aesthetic reform of domestic spaces.

Oil on canvas in square format with Klimt's mature all-over application. The garden's cultivated geometry — paths, planted beds, fencing — is embedded within a dense vegetative field painted in short, individually placed strokes. Architectural elements are rendered in the same painterly language as organic ones, unifying the man-made and natural into a single surface texture.