Cottage Garden with Sunflowers

Klimt painted his landscapes almost always in a square format, because he thought a square was the calmest shape and made the picture feel like a world seen through a window. Here he builds the composition in small touches of pure colour, close to the technique of the French Pointillists, but the effect is decorative rather than scientific. The sunflowers were, for Klimt, almost human figures; he painted one alone, in the same years, standing in a garden like a woman in a long dress. Look at how the dark leaves at the bottom anchor the picture, and how the top row of blooms leans slightly, as if in a breeze.

The painting was shown at the great art exhibition in Vienna in nineteen hundred and eight, the same one where The Kiss appeared, and was bought for the modern gallery that would become the Belvedere collection. Klimt made his landscapes without preparatory drawings, standing at the easel in the open air and sometimes using a viewfinder made from a piece of card to choose his square of garden. This is one of the pictures that shows how much joy there was in an artist we usually think of as an anxious sensualist.

Did You Know? Klimt chose his landscape views with a small square viewfinder cut from cardboard, and sometimes with opera glasses, before setting up his easel outdoors.