Impressionist landscapes are not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about Gustav Klimt, but the rare landscape Insel im Attersee (1902) came from a private collection in New York. The rare work will be up for auction May 16 at Sotheby’s for a price that will reach $45 million.

Klimt was largely influenced by nature and spent his summers in the Austrian and Italian countryside. He was often seen with his life partner, Austrian fashion designer Emily Flege, and her family at their home on Lake Attersee.

In 1900, Klimt began open-air studies of the lake, focusing on the alternating iridescence of the water. Her first image – a foggy painting in cold colors – belongs to the Leopold Museum. In Insel im Attersee, the artist expanded his color palette to capture the reflection of sunlight.

The painting gained notoriety when Klimt’s gallery owner, the Austrian art critic Otto Kaller, included it in one of his first exhibitions, Rescued from Europe, after the opening of the St. Etienne Gallery in New York in 1939. Kallier moved from Austria to Lucerne, then to Paris, and finally to New York between 1938 and 1939 due to the Nazi regime, keeping as many works as possible from artists such as Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Alfred Kubin.

Source: RES-IPE