Almost every landscape has green in it. A green painting is one where green is the subject of the picture, or its key.
As paint, green has always been awkward. Painters often mixed it from blue and yellow, or used copper greens that could darken. Some of the brightest greens of the 1800s contained arsenic. For each picture, I follow what its green was made of, how it went on, or how viewers took it.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting is here if at least one of these holds. Green is in its title, or in what the painter or his contemporaries said about it. A technical study has identified the green, how it was laid on or how it aged. Or green covers most of the canvas. Views with green as only one band of scenery stayed out.
12. Gustav Klimt, The Park (1910 or earlier)
Dense green treetops fill a square canvas, built up from tiny brushstrokes. Gustav Klimt made it in summer, no later than 1910.
The trees stood by the Attersee, in Austria's Salzkammergut. From 1908 to 1912, Klimt passed his summers by that lake.
Seen as a whole, the foliage reads like a mosaic of small green touches.
I'd call the result a wall of leaves rather than a view into a park, because those touches keep the eye on the paint itself.
When he worked outdoors, Klimt framed his scenes with a viewfinder, a square opening cut in a sheet of cardboard. His own viewfinder survives at Vienna's Leopold Museum, a card of 9.5 by 5.6 centimeters.
Klimt used it together with a telescope. In a letter of August 1903 to Mizzi Zimmermann, his lover, he described searching for motifs through "a hole cut in a piece of cardboard."
The square opening fits the square format that Klimt had favored for his landscapes since 1899.
At a Glance
Artist: Gustav Klimt (1862 to 1918)
Painted: 1910 or earlier
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 110.4 × 110.4 cm (43 1/2 × 43 1/2 in)
Where to see it: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
About This Painting
Is The Park the same picture as Park at Kammer Castle?
The Klimt Database, an online catalog of his work, lists the New York canvas as Park of Kammer Castle on the Attersee and dates it 1909. The Neue Galerie in New York has shown a different 1909 canvas titled Park at Kammer Castle.
How did The Park reach MoMA?
MoMA acquired it in 1957 through the Gertrud A. Mellon Fund. Its object number, 10.1957, records that year.
11. Théodore Rousseau, Descent of the Cattle (1834 to 1835)
A herd of cattle comes down from the mountains between masses of trees that have turned a dark, transparent brown. The paint surface is strongly deformed and cracked.
Théodore Rousseau, a Barbizon landscape painter distinct from Henri Rousseau, painted the canvas in 1834 and 1835. The Paris Salon jury refused it in 1836 and again in 1838.