At Lake Attersee (1900 CE)

In the summer of 1900 Gustav Klimt pointed his gaze at Lake Attersee and painted almost nothing else. The resulting picture, known as At Lake Attersee or Am Attersee, is an 80.2 × 80.2 cm (31.6 × 31.6 in) square of oil on canvas in which turquoise water occupies nearly the entire surface. Only a dark sliver of Litzlberg Island appears in the upper right corner. There is no sky worth speaking of, no boats, no figures, and none of the ornamental gold that would soon make Klimt famous. The painting asks the viewer to look the way the artist himself looked: slowly, at ripples, color shifts, and the quiet pulse of a mountain lake.

The First Summer That Recast His Eye

Klimt arrived at Attersee in 1900 at a turning point. He was thirty-eight, president of the Vienna Secession, and already embroiled in controversy over his Faculty Paintings for the University of Vienna. That summer he traveled with Emilie Flöge and her family to the small settlement of Litzlberg on the lake’s northern shore and stayed at the Bräuhof, a guesthouse attached to a brewery. It was his first extended stay in the Salzkammergut. He would return almost every summer until 1916 and produce the great majority of his roughly fifty landscapes there.

He worked with a simple cardboard viewfinder—a square hole cut in a piece of card that he called his “seeker.” Holding it to one eye, he isolated fragments of the landscape and flattened them into the square format that would become a hallmark of his later work. At Lake Attersee was painted during those first weeks, when the novelty of the turquoise water and the freedom from commissions still felt new.

A Frame Full of Lake Water

When the painting appeared at the tenth Secession exhibition in Vienna in the spring of 1901, the critic Ludwig Hevesi captured it in a single sentence that has followed the picture ever since: “A frame full of lake water, of the Attersee, nothing but short gray and green waves flowing into each other.” The remark is both description and praise. Contemporary viewers were struck by how little the picture contained and how much atmosphere it still produced.

Klimt’s own letters from later summers give a sense of the life around the canvas. He rose around six, painted in the nearby woods, breakfasted, took a cautious swim, then returned to a “lake picture” if the sun was out. After lunch came a nap, another swim, and more painting until supper. He sometimes rowed “to give the muscles a bit of a shake.” The 1900 picture belongs to that same unhurried, almost monastic rhythm, even if the exact daily timetable for that first year is not recorded.

Two years later he painted the same view again on a larger square, 100.5 × 100.5 cm (39.6 × 39.6 in). The later version, Insel im Attersee, is brighter and more yellow-green; the 1900 canvas remains cooler, grayer, and more restrained.

Quiet Rebellion Inside the Secession

At Lake Attersee occupies a peculiar place in Klimt’s work. While Vienna argued over his allegories and golden portraits, he was privately reducing landscape to color, rhythm, and a single geometric format. The painting sits at the edge of abstraction yet remains rooted in observation. It belongs to Art Nouveau in its decorative surface and to Impressionism in its broken strokes, but it is neither. The high horizon, the suppressed sky, and the refusal of conventional picturesque views feel closer to a modern, almost meditative way of seeing.

The picture carries no overt symbolism or ritual meaning. Its significance lies in what it leaves out. By stripping away architecture, human presence, and even most of the shoreline, Klimt turned the lake into an autonomous field of sensation. In that sense the work anticipates the more patterned, almost tapestry-like landscapes he would paint later in the decade.

Canvas, Oil, and a Deliberate Square

The painting is oil on canvas measuring 80.2 × 80.2 cm (31.6 × 31.6 in). Klimt signed it in the lower left: GUSTAV KLIMT. The square format was not yet his standard, but he already used it here with complete conviction. Short, discrete strokes of turquoise, gray, and green describe the water; they grow smaller toward the top of the canvas, creating a subtle recession without traditional linear perspective. The surface has a slightly undulating, almost mosaic quality that rewards close looking.

The work was painted at least in part out of doors, though Klimt often finished landscapes in the studio with the help of sketches and memory. Technical examination of the reverse has shown later canvas extensions and restoration traces from the 1960s, but the original conception remains intact.

From State Purchase to a Vienna Museum Wall

The painting left Klimt’s hands quickly. During the 1901 Secession exhibition the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education bought it for 2,000 Kronen and transferred it to the Moderne Galerie, later the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. In 1923 the museum exchanged it, together with another work, to the dealer Gustav Nebehay. It then passed through the Neue Galerie in Vienna and into the collection of the physician Bernhard Panzer. After Panzer’s death in 1934 it remained in family hands in Vienna, eventually reaching Maria Dressler and her daughter Maria Ittner.

In 1995 the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung acquired the picture. It now hangs in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Provenance research has found no evidence of Nazi-era confiscation or unresolved restitution claims; the work stayed in Vienna throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Today it is one of the museum’s defining Klimt landscapes, a quiet square of water.