Beech Grove I

Gustav Klimt's 'Beech Grove I' (1902) is one of his most celebrated forest subjects — the beech grove in autumn or late season, with its regular spacing of smooth grey trunks and the carpet of fallen leaves, providing a subject that suited his decorative treatment of the natural world. Klimt's forest subjects were painted at Attersee in the Austrian lake district, where he spent summers with the Flöge family, and his engagement with the forest's specific quality of vertical repetition and pattern created some of his most successful landscape-decorative works.

Klimt renders the beech grove with his characteristic pointillist-influenced technique applied to the natural subject — the forest floor's leaf carpet and the dappled light through the canopy built from small, individualized touches of paint that created a densely worked, vibrating surface. His handling of the repeated vertical rhythm of the beech trunks and the varied carpet of leaves beneath creates the specific decorative quality of his forest subjects. His square-format canvases for landscape subjects eliminated the conventional sky-dominated horizontal landscape in favor of a concentrated study of the forest interior.