Island in the Attersee

For over twenty years Klimt enjoyed spending the summer months with his lover Emilie Flöge and her family by the Attersee. A great lover of boating, Klimt, like Monet before him, enjoyed the luxury of painting nature from the undisturbed privacy of a boat, though Klimt was never as concerned as Monet or Sisley with the direct transposition of nature onto the surface of the canvas. The composition of this picture suggests that it may have been painted on, rather than beside, the Attersee. The luminous palette of colours and the use of broken brushwork to render the shimmering surface of the water, show Klimt’s knowledge of Monet’s work even before it was shown at the Secession in 1903. The oriental compositional device of the extremely high horizon line, used to flatten space, was also used by Monet in the later stages of his career.