What the painting shows

Pear Tree by Klimt fills a square canvas almost entirely with foliage, fruit, and light. The composition features an orchard dominated by a pear tree in full bloom, viewed from a close vantage point beneath the branches. Klimt builds the canopy using individual dabs of paint to form leaves, blossoms, and ripening yellow pears. These small touches of paint fuse together into a dense screen of color, leaving only small patches of pale blue sky visible in the upper corners.

Beneath this crown of foliage, several slender tree trunks rise from a strip of green lawn. The trunks display mottled bark in grey, brown, and green, leading the eye into the orchard. In the background, a distant hedge runs across the lower third of the canvas, limiting how far you can see between the trees. The brushstrokes create a shimmering surface that art historian Stephan Koja described as a painted mosaic with a carpet-like structure.

You can see distinct variations across the surface. The left side of the composition has a noticeably denser application of paint than the center or right, showing where Klimt returned to rework the canvas over time. By combining oil paint with touches of gold leaf, the foliage glints with accents that connect this work to his gold period.

The story behind it

Klimt probably began Pear Tree in August 1903 during his summer stay at Litzlberg on Lake Attersee. To frame his compositions in the countryside, he often used a square cardboard viewfinder. That tool led him to choose a square format of 101 by 101 centimeters, breaking away from the standard horizontal shape common in European landscapes.

Klimt completed the work in his Vienna studio in time for his retrospective at the 18th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, which opened on November 14, 1903. Earlier that year, the Secession had mounted an exhibition where Klimt directly encountered works by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Pear Tree was among the first works painted in his Pointillist-influenced late style. Reviewing the exhibition, contemporary art critic Ludwig Hevesi observed that Klimt adapted Divisionism into an independent personal style. Art historian Karen Wilkin points out that the canvas anticipates his later landscape work through its repetitive brushstrokes, inventive palette of blues, greens, and yellows, and geometric foundation.

After the 1903 exhibition, Klimt gave Pear Tree to his muse, Emilie Louise Flöge. He did not leave the canvas untouched, however. He continued to work on it after giving it away, altering the paint surface until 1918. Today, the work holds a key place among the wide range of subjects cataloged across every Klimt painting.

Where to see it

Pear Tree is on permanent display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, one of the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The painting remained in Vienna until 1933, when it entered the collection of Otto Kallir’s Neue Galerie. Kallir relocated his gallery to New York by 1940. That summer, he included Pear Tree in his exhibition “Saved from Europe” alongside Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady and The Park. In 1956, Kallir donated Pear Tree to Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and it is now housed and displayed within the Busch-Reisinger Museum collection.