Farmhouse with birch trees

Farmhouse with Birch Trees was painted by Klimt around 1900 during his Attersee summers, combining the two landscape motifs he returned to repeatedly: birch trees and rural Austrian agricultural life. Unlike his ornate Viennese decorative commissions, these landscapes painted in the Upper Austrian countryside reveal a simpler, more direct engagement with natural subject matter. The farmhouse anchors the composition in the working landscape of the Salzkammergut, while the birches provide vertical rhythm and the shimmer of silver and green. Now held by the Belvedere museum in Vienna, this work exemplifies how Klimt used landscape painting as a counterbalance to the elaborate symbolism of his figure paintings.

Klimt flattens the pictorial space by pushing the farmhouse and trees toward the canvas surface, eliminating deep recession. His square format crops the scene unconventionally, and the handling of the birch foliage — short, mosaic strokes of varied greens — creates a tapestry-like surface effect.