Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II)

Klimt's 'Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II)' (1903) belongs to his distinctive landscape practice, which he pursued separately from his celebrated allegorical and decorative works. Klimt spent summers at the Austrian lake district and painted the surrounding landscape with the same decorative intensity he brought to human subjects. The poplar tree — tall, vertical, trembling — against an approaching storm creates a natural spectacle that Klimt charges with the same vibrant, almost menacing energy as his symbolic paintings. The Leopold Museum in Vienna holds this as a key example of his lesser-known but deeply accomplished landscape work.

The tree is rendered as a shimmering mass of individually noted leaves — thousands of small brushstrokes that collectively convey the tree's vibration in pre-storm wind. The dark, heavy sky behind creates a dramatic tonal contrast that makes the bright tree appear almost luminous. The composition is strikingly simple: one tree, one sky, one strip of earth, with extraordinary chromatic complexity within each zone.