Der Apfelbaum (The Apple Tree I)

Gustav Klimt

Oil on canvas

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere

Der Apfelbaum (The Apple Tree I) depicts a single apple tree laden with red fruit and abundant foliage, rendered in Klimt's characteristic mosaic-like style of densely applied, multi-hued brushstrokes. The composition fills the square canvas almost entirely with the tree and its surrounding meadow, allowing only the faintest glimpse of sky, and employs a simultaneous flattening and layering of pictorial space that was a hallmark of Klimt's mature landscape practice. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), the Austrian founding president of the Vienna Secession and a central figure of European Art Nouveau, produced his landscape paintings largely during summer sojourns away from Vienna, working on square canvases that echoed the geometric ideals of the Secession movement. The painting represents Klimt's late period, in which his landscapes moved away from the rigid linearity of his Golden Phase toward a more organic, painterly vision of nature.