Island on the Attersee (ca 1901–1902 CE)

Island on the Attersee or (Insel im Attersee), painted around 1901–1902, is an oil on canvas measuring 100.5 by 100.5 centimetres (39.6 by 39.6 inches). It shows Litzlberg Island in Austria’s Lake Attersee as seen from the northern shore, looking south. Klimt pushed the horizon so high that the composition is almost nothing but water. The island appears only as a cropped mass at the upper right; the distant mountains dissolve into a thin violet band. Short strokes of turquoise, green, yellow, rose and lilac turn the lake into a living surface rather than a view through a window. Over nine-tenths of the canvas is water.

Summers at Attersee, far from Vienna’s commissions

Klimt came late to landscape painting. From about 1898 onward he spent nearly every summer in the Salzkammergut, first at Litzlberg on the Attersee and later at other villages around the lake. He travelled with Emilie Flöge and her family. The lake was quieter than fashionable Bad Ischl, where the emperor summered, and it gave him something his Viennese portraits and allegories did not: work done only for himself.

Between 1900 and 1916 he painted more than forty of his roughly fifty known landscapes there. Island on the Attersee belongs to his third summer at Litzlberg. Surviving letters place him at the lake from 28 July to 4 September 1902. That same summer he also painted Beech Forest I, A Summer Day, and The Large Poplar II (Rising Thunderstorm). Two years earlier, in 1900, he had already tried the same view in the smaller On Lake Attersee now in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. In the later picture the island sits more freely in the water and the light turns warmer, almost golden.

The wood goblinand a cardboard window 

Locals nicknamed Klimt the wood goblin or wood gnome. He could stare at the water for hours, watching light change across the surface. To compose, he used a small square cardboard viewer, only a few centimetres across, held up to isolate a fragment of the landscape. That modest tool explains the high horizon, the cropped island, and the sense that the picture is a decorative field rather than a traditional vista.

When landscape edged toward abstraction

The painting sits at a turning point. Klimt’s public reputation rested on allegory and, soon, the gold of the so-called Golden Period. At the lake he was free of those obligations. The square format, which he would use again and again, flattens the scene. Japanese prints taught him to crop boldly; Impressionism and Pointillism taught him to break colour into short, vibrating marks. The result is not a souvenir of a holiday but a modern picture in which the subject almost dissolves into pattern and atmosphere.

There is no overt symbolism in the usual Klimt sense—no gold leaf, no femme fatale, no allegory of life and death. The meaning is the lake itself: stillness, repetition, the pleasure of looking until water becomes colour. 

Canvas, oil, and a signature on the stretcher

The work is oil on canvas, 100.5 by 100.5 centimetres (39½ by 39½ inches). Klimt signed it “Gustav Klimt” on the stretcher, not on the painted surface. The square is deliberate. Academic landscape usually preferred a horizontal rectangle; Klimt’s choice treats the lake as an even field, closer to a textile or a decorative panel than to a window onto nature.

The paint is applied in small, directional strokes that change size with distance. In the foreground they are longer and more separate; toward the horizon they tighten and melt together. Thin priming lets some of the canvas’s light show through in the nearer water, so the surface never becomes heavy. Colour shifts from green and turquoise in front to paler, almost colourless light in the middle distance, then to the violet of the far shore. The island’s reflection is darker and more broken, anchoring the upper right without restoring conventional depth.

From a Viennese collection to a New York sale

By 1926 the painting belonged to Paul and Irene Hellmann in Vienna. They were Jewish collectors and early patrons of the arts. The work later passed to Irene’s brother Josef Redlich or his heirs. Otto Kallir, founder of the Neue Galerie in Vienna acquired it by 1937. After the Anschluss he fled; the painting travelled with him and entered American viewership through his gallery.

Irene Hellmann was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944; her son Bernhard died at Sobibor in 1943. Questions have been raised about the transfer in the mid-1930s. Sotheby’s and independent provenance researchers concluded that the painting was not looted or sold under Nazi duress, but passed to the Redlich family before the Anschluss, likely to settle a debt. Kallir, himself a Jewish exile, then held it legitimately. From Kallir’s estate it went in 1978 to a private New York collection. On 16 May 2023 it appeared at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction in New York and sold for 53,188,500 US dollars to a Japanese private collector. It is no longer on public view. Around the lake itself, the Gustav Klimt Centre in Schörfling and the Klimt theme trail still let visitors stand near the viewpoints from which these pictures were imagined.