Farm Garden with Sunflowers

Gustav Klimt painted this garden during one of his summer holidays at Lake Attersee in the Austrian countryside. From 1900 to 1907 he stayed each summer at the brewery inn in the lakeside village of Litzlberg, and he found this subject in a farm garden next door. Landscapes were the only subject besides the human figure that seriously interested Klimt, and most of them were painted on these Attersee summers. He often chose a square canvas, an unusual shape for landscapes, and is said to have picked his views through a square hole cut in a piece of card. Klimt was born near Vienna in 1862, the son of a gold engraver, and in 1897 he became the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of young artists who broke away from the city's conservative art establishment. The painting's first owner was Hermine Wittgenstein, a daughter of the Viennese industrialist Karl Wittgenstein.