Pear Tree (1903 CE)

A pear tree in full bloom nearly swallows the canvas. Up close it looks like a carpet of green, gold, lavender, and rose; step back, and the dabs resolve into leaves, blossoms, and fruit hanging in a dense canopy. Gustav Klimt painted Pear Tree (Birnbaum) in 1903 and then kept returning to it for another fifteen years. What you see today is both a summer landscape from Lake Attersee and a record of how one of Vienna’s most famous artists refused to leave a gift alone.

A canopy that almost hides the sky

The painting is a square and that shape is part of the meaning. A pear tree in bloom dominates the field. Its branches fuse into a flickering surface in which each small stroke of paint stands for a single leaf, flower, or fruit. Only the upper corners admit a sliver of sky.

Behind the principal tree, thinner trunks and a distant hedge close off the view, so the orchard feels both deep and strangely flat, like a tapestry hung in front of the viewer rather than a window onto nature. The left side of the canvas carries a thicker, more crowded layer of paint than the center or the right. That unevenness is not an accident of haste. It is the visible trace of Klimt coming back to the picture long after he had given it away.

Summer at Litzlberg and a winter exhibition in Vienna

Klimt spent the summers of about 1900 to 1907 at Litzlberg on Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, away from the pressure of Vienna. Pear Tree was most likely begun there in August 1903 and finished in his city studio in time for the eighteenth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, a large retrospective of his own work that opened on 14 November 1903.

Klimt was already moving into what later critics would call his Golden Phase. In 1903 he also traveled to Ravenna and stood before the Byzantine mosaics whose glittering, non-illusionistic surfaces would haunt his portraits and allegories. Contemporary critic Ludwig Hevesi praised the picture’s color and argued that Klimt had taken the lessons of divisionism and made them his own.

The painting belongs with other square orchard and woodland scenes from the same stretch of years, among them Fruit Trees of 1901, the two versions of The Large Poplar, Birch Forest of 1903, and the now-destroyed Golden Apple Tree of the same year. Together they show how much of Klimt’s mature language was worked out not only in gilded portraits but under fruit trees beside an Austrian lake.

The gift he would not stop painting

In 1903 Klimt gave Pear Tree to Emilie Flöge, the fashion designer who was his closest companion for decades and whom museum labels still call his muse and mistress. The gift did not end the work. Because the canvas lived with someone he saw constantly, he could keep adding to it. He filled bare passages, thickened the left side, and, according to Harvard curator Lynette Roth, closed in the trees at the lower right that had once been more open.

The official date on the object is therefore “1903 (reworked by the artist 1903/1918).” He died on 6 February 1918. The picture is, in that sense, a long conversation with a person as much as a view of a tree. That he kept touching a landscape he had already given her is one of the most intimate facts attached to the work. It also explains why the surface feels denser in some places than others: the painting grew the way a living pear tree grows, season after season.

When a landscape learned to behave like a mosaic

Vienna around 1900 was trying to invent an art free of academic history painting. Klimt, a founder of the Secession in 1897, made the square one of that movement’s signature shapes. Traditional landscape is a wide window; Pear Tree is a tile. The format came in part from the square viewfinder he used to crop motifs around the Attersee, but it also declared that a landscape could be as decorative, as self-contained, and as modern as a poster or a mosaic. Each dab of color functions like a tessera. The flickering field recalls both French post-impressionism and the gold grounds of Ravenna. There is no ritual meaning in a strict religious sense, yet the picture treats fertility, blossom, and the endless repetition of leaves as something close to a secular icon.

About a quarter of Klimt’s painted oeuvre is landscape, a fact long overshadowed by paintings like The Kiss and the society portraits.

Oil, casein, and a square that measures a meter on each side

The support is canvas. Harvard Art Museums, which owns the work, describes the medium as oil and casein. Casein is a milk-protein binder that dries to a more matte, fresco-like surface than oil alone; it helps explain the chalky, mosaic sparkle of the foliage. The painted surface measures 101 by 101 centimeters, or 39 3/4 by 39 3/4 inches. The uneven paint film on the left remains the most telling technical fact: Klimt treated the finished gift as a surface that could still be amended, almost until the end of his life.

From Emilie Flöge’s rooms to a gallery in Cambridge

The chain of ownership is unusually clear for a Klimt of this date. The artist gave the painting to Emilie Flöge in Vienna in 1903. By 1933 it was with Otto Kallir’s Neue Galerie in Vienna. Kallir, who also ran Galerie St. Etienne, moved the business first to Paris by 1939 and then to New York by 1950. In the summer of 1940 Pear Tree appeared in his New York exhibition “Saved from Europe”, a title that says much about how the picture left the Continent. In 1956 Kallir gave it to Harvard’s Fogg Museum; in 1966 it was assigned to the Busch-Reisinger Museum, where it remains.