The Sunflower (1907–1908 CE)

Gustav Klimt’s The Sunflower (Die Sonnenblume), painted in 1907–1908, is not a still life of cut blooms in a vase. It is a living plant, still rooted in a garden, turned into something closer to a figure. On a square canvas a lone sunflower rises at the exact centre, its head slightly inclined, its leaves falling like a cloak over a crowded bed of summer flowers. Behind it a green hedge fills every remaining inch of the picture, so that there is no sky and almost no depth—only a dense, shimmering wall of foliage. The effect is both intimate and ceremonial: an ordinary composite flower given the dignity of a sitter. That tension between garden and portrait is what makes the painting linger.

Summers by the Attersee and the Vienna of 1908

From about 1900 Klimt spent part of each summer at the Attersee in Austria’s Salzkammergut, often with Emilie Flöge and her family. The lake landscape supplied him with the square garden and orchard fragments that became his preferred landscape format. 1907 was his last season at the Bräuhof in Litzlberg; The Sunflower belongs to that stay and to the months that followed in Vienna. He is said to have used a homemade square cardboard frame to isolate the most satisfying slice of hedge or meadow before he painted.

The finished canvas first appeared at the Kunstschau Wien of 1908, the large exhibition organised by the so-called Klimt group after its break with the Vienna Secession. In Klimt’s room it hung among new or newly finished works that defined his Golden Period, including The Kiss (still unfinished), Danaë, Poppies in Bloom, and the related Farm Garden with Sunflowers. The same picture was shown again at the Tenth International Art Exhibition in Munich in 1909. Those two exhibitions placed a quiet garden close-up in the same public conversation as Klimt’s most famous lovers and mythological nudes.

The Love-Struck Fairy and the Woman in the Reform Dress

Contemporary viewers immediately sensed a human presence. Ludwig Hevesi, the Secession’s most attentive critic, wrote that Klimt’s sunflower looked “like a love-struck fairy whose greenish-gray robes flow down with passionate tremors.” Others have seen a medieval Virgin of Mercy, the spreading leaves standing in for the mantle that shelters the small figures—or here, the small flowers—at her feet.

A more specific identification has proved hard to dismiss. In the summer of 1906 Klimt photographed Emilie Flöge in the garden at the Attersee, wearing the long reform dresses she designed for the fashion salon she ran with her sisters. The silhouette of the tall sunflower—disk like a head, petals like a halo, foliage like a trailing gown—echoes those photographs with unusual closeness. Klimt otherwise kept portraiture and landscape in separate rooms of his practice. The Sunflower is the nearest he came to letting one genre borrow the other’s intimacy. 

A Landscape Like Ornament

The Sunflower belongs to the peak of Klimt’s Golden Period and to a broader shift in how he treated nature. Earlier landscapes, from roughly 1898 to 1902, often worked through mood and weather. Here the interest is different: organic life that simply exists, arranged with the discipline of a textile. The German painter Max Liebermann is reported to have said that Viennese painting was not pictures but painted carpets. This canvas makes that remark feel exact. Depth collapses into pattern; the hedge becomes a ground as closed and rhythmic as a mosaic. Tiny points of gold lift the greens and yellows without turning the garden into jewellery. The composition also converses with The Kiss of the same years. Both works set a pyramidal central form on a floral base against an ornamental field that admits no ordinary horizon. Shown together in 1908, they suggested that Klimt’s language of embrace, enclosure and decoration could migrate from human figures into a single plant. 

Oil, Gold Leaf, and a Perfect Square

The painting is oil and gold leaf on canvas. It measures 110 by 110 centimetres, or 43.3 by 43.3 inches. The square is not an accident. Klimt favoured that format for landscapes because it cancelled the panoramic “view” and forced the motif to fill the field like a panel or a textile. He signed the work at the lower right in two lines: GUSTAV / KLIMT.

The gold is discreet. Particles of leaf are set among the leaves and blossoms so that light glances off the surface without forming a solid golden ground of the kind found in the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait. The result is a garden that remains recognisably green and floral, yet is quietly metallic, as if nature itself had been given a faint liturgical sheen. The paint handling combines relatively precise drawing in the sunflower’s head and leaves with a denser, almost stippled weave in the surrounding hedge and the carpet of smaller flowers.

From a Viennese Family Collection to the Belvedere

The picture’s later life is unusually well documented. It was acquired by Oberbaurat Heinrich Mayer, great-uncle of the collector Peter Parzer, reportedly from the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein. It then passed within the family to Parzer (1937–2010), remaining in private hands through most of the twentieth century—which is why older catalogues still list a private collection. In 2012 Parzer’s bequest brought The Sunflower and Klimt’s Family of 1909–10 to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Director Agnes Husslein-Arco called the gift the most important addition to the museum.