Farm Garden (Bauerngarten)

Gustav Klimt

Oil on canvas

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere

Gustav Klimt's Farm Garden (Bauerngarten) is a radiant oil painting depicting a densely packed rural flower garden in which blossoms of varied hues crowd the entire picture plane, eliminating the horizon and sky and transforming the natural world into a near-abstract tapestry of color and pattern. Klimt composed the work in his characteristic square format, using the device of an extreme close-up to flatten spatial depth and render the flowers as intricately elaborated decorative motifs — a quality that contemporaries compared to ornamental carpet-making. The canvas exemplifies his mature landscape practice, developed during summer sojourns at the Attersee in the Austrian lake district, where he used a self-made cardboard frame to select tightly cropped natural details as his subjects. As a leading figure of the Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau, Klimt brought to his landscapes the same ornamental sensibility and chromatic intensity that distinguished his celebrated figurative works.