Gustav Klimt and Attersee

Austrian artist Gustav Klimt is lauded as one of the leading lights of the Vienna Secession art movement. His portraits are celebrated for their innovation, style and controversy.

Alongside these portraits, a series of landscapes and floral paintings highlight the role of an Austrian lake in Klimt's inspiration. Visiting over many summers, Klimt painted these paintings around the Attersee lake in Upper Austria - not on commission, simply as he loved the landscapes.

Beginning in the late 1890s, Gustav Klimt visited Attersee each summer. Between 1900 and 1916, he created around 40 of his more than 50 known landscape paintings in this region, and thus created an impressive artistic legacy for Attersee.

He spent eight summers at an inn in Litzlberg, and later moved across the lake to the east bank in 1908 to stay at Villa Oleander for several summers.

This holiday home, built in 1872, belonged to Kammer Castle. Klimt was captivated by painting the building - from 1908 onwards, he portrayed it five times and its adjoining gardens twice.

Klimt's paintings do not often follow the rules of perspective - in his paintings, he moves buildings closer together and flattens the perspective. Distances are cancelled out by his artistic vision and he transforms spaces into surfaces.

Klimt also portrayed landscapes where buildings, flowers and the lake create colourful forms.

Gustav Klimt loved to relax and lose himself in painting the world of plants and flowers. Rather than accurate depictions, the resulting paintings are a playful and sensual mix of colours and shapes.

Near Attersee, Klimt was inspired by fruit trees, blooming meadows and hills and forest of birch, beech and fir trees.

Today, Klimt's Attersee paintings are among his best-known and most expensive paintings. In November 2003, his Landhaus am Attersee sold for around $29 million and Litzlberg am Attersee was auctioned for around $40 million in November 2011.