What the painting shows

Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee by Gustav Klimt depicts the Austrian village of Unterach set against a steep, densely wooded hill. At the bottom edge, you see a band of pale yellow-green meadow dotted with upright, rounded bushes. A strip of calm water cuts across the lower half of the composition. Dark evergreens and deciduous trees rise from the near and far banks of the lake, framing the shore.

Behind the water sits the village itself. You can spot white houses with red and brown roofs, alongside a church tower topped with a red dome. Higher up the slope, a large yellow house rests among green pastures. Above the settlement, the forest fills almost the entire upper half of the square canvas. Klimt applied small dabs of green, yellow, blue, and violet paint to create the dense foliage, leaving only a tiny sliver of pale sky in the upper left corner.

The story behind it

Klimt painted Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee in 1916 using oil on canvas. The work belongs to his broader series of landscapes, which occupied much of his artistic energy during his later years.

The painting is part of Klimt’s landscapes and the Attersee, created during his regular summer retreats to the lake region. He chose a square format of 110 by 110 cm for the piece. This square dimension allowed him to flatten three-dimensional space, stacking the lake, the buildings, and the forested hillside into an interlocking grid of color and natural texture.

Where to see it

Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee is held in a private collection and is not on regular public display. The painting was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on 18 November 2025.