Garden with Roosters

Garden with Roosters (1917) belongs to Klimt's final year of production, one of several garden and landscape subjects he was working on alongside unfinished portraits when he suffered his fatal stroke in January 1918. Garden paintings occupied Klimt throughout his mature career as a counterpoint to the symbolic and erotic intensity of his figural work: they offered formal problems of colour, texture, and all-over composition without the psychological charge of the female subject. The inclusion of roosters — animals whose upright, assertive posture and vivid colouring make them natural subjects for Klimt's mark-making — introduces living forms into the garden composition and connects this work to a long tradition of Austro-German decorative painting in which barnyard animals appear as elements of a designed rural scene. Klimt's late garden paintings are characterised by increasing chromatic intensity and a density of ornamental mark-making that approaches pure abstraction in places. The uncompromising decorative logic — no compositional hierarchy, no narrative centre, no perspectival depth — makes these late works among his most radical contributions to early modernist painting.

Oil on canvas with characteristic all-over application, likely in Klimt's square format. The roosters' plumage provides opportunity for the kind of chromatic complexity — iridescent greens, reds, and blacks — that Klimt pursued in his late works. Garden vegetation is handled with the same density of mark as the animals, integrating figure and ground into a continuous ornamental fabric.