Farm Garden with Crucifix 1911-1912 CE

Gustav Klimt’s Farm Garden with Crucifix — in German, Bauerngarten mit Kruzifix — is a square summer landscape in which a rural wayside shrine nearly disappears into flowers. At the centre of the picture stands a simple pole with a crucifix and, beneath the figure of Christ, a small statue of the Virgin Mary in blue. Yellow blossoms crowd the upper part of the shrine; reds, pinks and whites climb from below. Behind it rise tall trees; to the left, a fragment of a wooden farmhouse slips into view. The painting does not preach. It treats a humble “Marterl”, the kind of roadside monument still common in Upper Austria, as one more living thing in a dense meadow. That tension — devotion half-overgrown by nature — is what makes the work so memorable. The original no longer exists. It burned on 8 May 1945. What we know of it comes from photographs and early reproductions, which is why the picture still has a public life even after the canvas itself is gone.

On the Eve of a Darker Century

Klimt painted the work in 1911–1912, most often dated 1912, during the summers he spent with Emilie Flöge and her family in the Salzkammergut. From around 1900 he returned almost every year to the region around Lake Attersee. Between 1908 and 1912 the group stayed at Villa Oleander in Kammerl, near Kammer am Attersee. The landscape belongs to that stretch of countryside between the Attersee and the Mondsee, where farm gardens, wooden houses and wayside crosses sit close together.

The first documented public showing was in Prague in 1914, under the title Kreuz in einem Bauerngarten — “Cross in a Farm Garden.” By then Europe was sliding toward war. Klimt himself was not a religious painter in the usual sense. Apart from this canvas, explicit Christian imagery is rare in his oeuvre; the unfinished Adam and Eve of 1917–18 is the other main exception. Here the shrine is less a statement of faith than a piece of vernacular life, recorded in the same years as Farmhouse in Upper Austria (1911), now in the Belvedere in Vienna. Observers at the Gustav Klimt-Zentrum am Attersee have suggested that the house glimpsed at the left of the lost garden may be the same building. The identification is still debated, but it places the picture firmly among the late Attersee landscapes.

The House in the Corner, and a Garden That Grew Back

One of the more appealing details attached to the painting is that possible echo of Farmhouse in Upper Austria. If the fragment at the left is the same farmhouse, Klimt first painted the building as a whole and then, a season later, stepped closer into its garden and let the shrine take the centre. It is a small, human way of working: same place, different distance.

Another afterlife is more unexpected. In 2019 a living Gustav Klimt Garden opened in Schörfling am Attersee, planned by the Klimt Foundation and regional partners. Six of Klimt’s garden pictures from 1907 to 1916 became the planting concept for square beds, among them Farm Garden with Crucifix. Visitors walk through flowers chosen to recall a painting that can no longer be hung on a wall. The reconstruction cannot replace the lost canvas, but it returns the motif to the landscape that produced it.

When Flowers Become Mosaic, and a Shrine Becomes Landscape

In Klimt’s late gardens the square canvas is not a window so much as a field of colour. Poppies, daisies and clustered yellow blooms are laid down in repeated marks that recall mosaic or embroidery more than plein-air sketching. Farm Garden with Crucifix belongs to that phase. Nature is not described so much as woven. The shrine gives the weaving a different charge. Klimt’s public fame rests on gold, allegory and society portraits. This picture is almost the opposite: a peasant garden, a wooden cross, a Madonna small enough to be mistaken for garden sculpture. In the Catholic countryside of Upper Austria such crosses marked paths, fields and farmsteads. They were part of daily geography. By letting flowers climb the pole until the sacred figures are half hidden, Klimt neither mocks nor monumentalizes them. He shows how belief and vegetation occupy the same ground.

The work also sits inside a larger story of Viennese modernism after the Secession. By 1911 Klimt had left the official Secession orbit and was painting landscapes that look toward Van Gogh in their broken colour while remaining tightly patterned. The garden series is the one in which a human, ritual object still stands in the middle of the pattern.

Oil, a Perfect Square, and a Picture Known Only at Second Hand

The painting was oil on canvas, 110 by 110 centimetres, or about 43¼ by 43¼ inches. That exact square is Klimt’s preferred landscape format in these years. It removes the panoramic horizon and forces the eye to travel across a surface rather than into deep space. Because the original burned, technical remarks about the paint layer itself are limited. What reproductions show is a dense, relatively even covering of the canvas: little empty ground, strong local colour, and a crucifix that reads as a pale vertical against the floral mass. 

From a Patron’s Wall to a Castle That Burned on the Last Day of the War

The canvas entered the collection of August and Serena Lederer in Vienna, the most important private holding of Klimt’s work in his lifetime. After August’s death in 1936 it remained with Serena and their children, including Erich Lederer, in the family apartment at Bartensteingasse 8. 

After the Anschluss in March 1938 the apartment was looted by the Gestapo; the collection was seized in March 1939. In early 1943 Klimt works from the Lederer holdings were shown, without the owners’ consent, at the Secession building in Vienna. When air raids made the city unsafe, the pictures were sent for storage to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, the Freudenthal family seat, which the monuments authority had rented as a depot. Farm Garden with Crucifix is thought to have arrived around 3 April 1943 and appears on the wartime rescue lists.

On 8 May 1945, the last day of the war in Europe, Immendorf burned. Accounts differ on whether retreating German troops, timed charges or exploding ammunition started the fire. It lasted for days. Witnesses later described blackened canvases whose figures could still be guessed before a drought turned them to ash. With the painting went other Klimts from the same depot, among them the University Faculty Pictures, Music, Schubert at the Piano, The Golden Apple Tree, Portrait of Wally, Friends II, Garden Path with Chickens and Leda. A few scholars have asked whether every listed work truly arrived or burned. The prevailing view of the Klimt Foundation, the MAK and the Bundesdenkmalamt is that Farm Garden with Crucifix was destroyed there.

So the picture did not “end up” in a museum. It ended in a fire. What remains is the documentary trail — photographs, the Eisler print, catalogue entries — and the living beds at Schörfling, where the garden, at least, was allowed to grow again.