Oberösterreichisches Bauernhaus

Oberösterreichisches Bauernhaus (Upper Austrian Farmhouse), painted in 1911–12, belongs to the series of architectural landscape paintings Klimt made during his Attersee summers, in which he turned from the lake itself to the farmhouses and vernacular architecture of the surrounding Upper Austrian countryside. By 1911 Klimt had been making landscapes at the Attersee for over a decade, and this work reflects the mature confidence of his landscape style: the square format, the high-horizoned composition that fills the canvas with building and vegetation, and the all-over textural approach that treats wall, thatch, and garden equally as surfaces to be explored rather than objects to be described. The subject of the vernacular Austrian farmhouse carried a certain cultural resonance in the context of the emerging interest in regional architectural traditions that would later inform both the Heimatstil and the Arts and Crafts movement in Austria. Klimt's treatment, however, strips away any folkloristic or nationalist reading — the house becomes a formal structure of coloured surfaces and geometric volumes within the overall decorative composition. The painting is held by the Belvedere.

The farmhouse facade is rendered with horizontal and vertical stabs of warm cream and white paint applied over a toned ground, while the surrounding vegetation uses a richer, more varied chromatic approach. The square canvas format and high composition line are consistent with Klimt's established landscape practice at this period.