Tall Poplars II (Approaching Thunderstorm), 1903 by Gustav Klimt
Canvas Print - 10065-KLG

A single poplar dominates the right half of the canvas like a dark column of earth thrust skyward. Its crown vanishes beyond the upper edge, its base barely visible behind a small white chapel that anchors the composition where horizontal ground meets vertical tree. Klimt found this tree near the Seehofkapelle in Litzlberg on the Attersee, and he painted it with the kind of obsessive attention to surface that would define his landscape work for years to come.

The sky is extraordinary – not a backdrop but a living weight. Grey-blue and silver tones swirl in slow, heavy masses, the approaching storm suggested rather than declared. There is no lightning, no rain, no dramatic diagonal of wind. Instead, the atmosphere thickens. You can almost feel the pressure drop, that peculiar stillness before weather breaks. A few pale patches of lighter blue peek through the overcast like the last breath of a calm afternoon.

Below, the horizon sits remarkably low, almost at the bottom fifth of the painting. A flat expanse of meadow stretches leftward, interrupted only by two or three distant trees so small they read as dark smudges. This radical compression of the land against the enormous sky recalls Caspar David Friedrich's strategy of dwarfing humanity beneath nature's scale – though Klimt's mood is less Romantic yearning than sensory immersion.

Look closely at the poplar's foliage. Klimt built it from thousands of individual touches – brown, deep green, flecks of orange-red, traces of blue – accumulated into a shimmering, almost textile density. The critic Ludwig Hevesi compared the effect to trout spots, and the description holds. Each tiny mark retains its independence while contributing to a single massive form. The meadow beneath uses a similar pointillist logic: earthy ochres and muted greens speckled with warmer dots, forming an ornamental surface rather than describing specific grasses or flowers.

The chapel is easy to miss, tucked at the tree's base like a footnote. Yet structurally it is essential. It marks the precise intersection of the painting's two governing axes – the long horizontal of the land and the towering vertical of the poplar. Without it, the composition might feel unmoored, the tree floating against sky and field. With it, everything locks into place.

Perhaps what lingers most is the emotional weight of the sky. Klimt rarely painted drama in his landscapes; he preferred quiet saturation, the mood of a place absorbed over hours. Here, though, something is about to happen. The air feels dense, almost audible – that low hum before thunder. The poplar stands in it, indifferent and immense, a presence as much as a tree. Standing before Tall Poplars II (Approaching Thunderstorm) at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, you understand why Klimt returned to the Attersee summer after summer. Not for the picturesque, but for this – a landscape so full of atmosphere it becomes a state of mind.