Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II) (1903 CE)

Gustav Klimt’s Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II) does not offer the golden shimmer or sunlit gardens for which he is most famous. Instead it holds a square of dusk in which one enormous poplar seems to push the weather itself into the picture. The horizon is crushed almost to the bottom edge of the canvas. A tiny chapel sits at the meeting point of earth and trunk. Above them the sky thickens into grey, blue-green and smouldering orange, while the tree’s foliage dissolves into a vibrating cloud of coloured specks. The painting feels both exact and uncanny: a real place at Litzlberg on the Attersee, and at the same time a portrait of tension, solitude and approaching weather.

Summers by the Lake and a Tree Painted Twice

Klimt came late to landscape. From 1900 to 1907 he spent his summers with the Flöge family at the guesthouse of the Litzlberg brewery on Lake Attersee in Austria’s Salzkammergut. The motifs he needed were close at hand. Beside the little Seehof Chapel stood a tall, slender poplar that dominated the meadow and the adjoining avenue. He painted that tree first in 1900, in a brighter, more naturalistic square picture now known as The Large Poplar I. Two years later he returned to the same motif from a slightly different angle and under a different sky.

The second version was begun around 1902 and finished in 1903. By then Klimt was already a central figure of the Vienna Secession, and his summer landscapes had become a private counterpart to the public scandals of his university murals and allegorical friezes. The Large Poplar II was shown at the Secession’s major Klimt exhibition in 1903–04, where reviewers immediately remarked on its sombre mood. The real tree did not outlive the painting by many years. Lightning struck it in 1928 and brought it down. The chapel, often called the Klimt Chapel today, still stands at the end of Seehofstraße in Litzlberg.

A Letter After Supper and a Square Cut in Cardboard

Klimt left a rare first-person trace of the picture. Writing from the Attersee to Maria “Mizzi” Zimmermann, one of his models and the mother of two of his sons, he described his daily rhythm: early painting, a swim, and then, after supper, work again on “a large poplar at dusk, with an approaching thunderstorm.” 

To isolate the motif he used a simple viewfinder: a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard. That device, sometimes supplemented by opera glasses or a telescope, explains the painting’s almost photographic compression. The land becomes a narrow ornamental strip. The tree becomes a vertical monument. The chapel becomes a hinge between the two.

Landscape as Ornament, Weather as Inner Weather

Most of Klimt’s Attersee landscapes feel timeless and sunlit. This one does not. It belongs to the same decorative world as his portraits and allegories, yet it turns decoration toward drama. The meadow is not described blade by blade; it is built from brown, red and green dots that gather into an ornamental mass. The leaves, too, refuse ordinary drawing. The critic Ludwig Hevesi compared their shimmer to the spots on a trout, a pointillist surface in orange-red, blue-green and neighbouring hues.

That surface is not merely stylish. The tree’s sides stay nearly parallel as they rise, so the poplar reads as a resisting column against a sky that has been loosened into wind-torn clouds. In the upper part of the picture the foliage almost stops being foliage and becomes an abstract, flame-like field. Commentators have called the result a soul-landscape: nature and artifice held in the same breath, the approaching storm standing as much for mood as for meteorology. Within Klimt’s work it is one of the few summer views that admits darkness, and that is why it still startles viewers who expect only gold and blossom from him.

Oil, a Perfect Square, and a Horizon Only Centimeters High

The painting is oil on canvas and almost exactly square: 100.8 × 100.8 cm, or about 39.7 × 39.7 inches. The format was Klimt’s preferred shape for landscape, a choice that flattens depth and turns the view into a tapestry-like plane. 

What looks from a distance like a solid tree is, close up, a dense scatter of small strokes. The sky is not a single grey but a wide, nuanced monochrome that still carries traces of other colours. The chapel marks the crossing of the composition’s horizontal and vertical axes. Nothing in the picture is accidental in placement; everything is arranged so that a modest lakeside motif can fill, and almost overflow, a canvas barely a metre on each side.

From the Flöge Household to a Museum Wall in Vienna

The painting stayed for decades inside the circle that had surrounded Klimt at the lake. On the reverse of the canvas an inscription in black ink reads that it was the property of Therese Flöge, née Paulick, of Vienna. She owned it until 1949. It then passed to Gertrude Flöge in Vienna, who held it until 1971. After a short period in unidentified private hands in Seewalchen it appeared at Dorotheum in Vienna on 28 May 1974. Rudolf Leopold and George McQuire acquired it that year; from 1976 it belonged to Leopold alone. In 1994 it entered the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung.

It remains there today, usually on view in the museum’s galleries in the MuseumsQuartier. In the summer of 2014 the original travelled back to the Attersee for a brief display at the Gustav Klimt Centre in Kammer-Schörfling, only a short distance from the chapel and the vanished tree.