Gustav Klimt:
Orchard in the Evening (Obstgarten am Abend) (1898)
Oil on canvas
69 × 55 cm
© Leopold Museum, Vienna
(Natter no. 110)

Long considered lost, this early landscape resurfaced only in recent decades, allowing a fuller understanding of Klimt’s artistic transition in the late 1890s. From a letter to Marie Zimmermann, his companion at the time, we know that Klimt immersed himself in Japanese art during the summer of 1898. Orchard in the Evening bears quiet traces of that encounter: the sharply cropped foreground, the flattened spatial rhythm, and the emphasis on pattern over depth all echo the visual language of Japanese woodblock prints. Klimt may even have used an optical device to achieve the abrupt framing, giving the composition its distinctive “cut” appearance.

He was far from alone in this fascination. Van Gogh, Manet, and many others were similarly captivated by Japanese aesthetics, yet Klimt absorbed these influences in a more atmospheric, contemplative register. In this painting, the orchard becomes a tapestry of dusk colours — a place where natural observation and decorative sensibility meet. The fading light softens the forms into a gentle haze, as if the scene were held in memory rather than seen directly.

The work was exhibited alongside After the Rain and Orchard at the 7th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, where Klimt presented a small but striking group of landscapes. The setting likely reflects the countryside around Litzlberg and the Attersee, where Klimt and the Flöge family spent their summers. Those months offered him a rhythm of quiet retreat — lake, orchard, evening walks — and that sense of calm permeates the canvas. In Orchard in the Evening, the day is closing, the colours deepen, and the orchard seems to breathe in the last light.

It is a modest canvas, yet it carries the tenderness of Klimt’s early landscapes — a moment suspended between observation and reverie, already pointing toward the shimmering, patterned worlds he would soon create.