Church at Unterach on Lake Atter, 1916 by Gustav Klimt

Unterach, also on the shores of Lake Atter, was the home of some other relatives of Emilie Floge, with whom she and Klimt stayed. Like the tower of the Schloss Kammer, Klimt dwelt on the church spire of Unterach, with its distinctive onion-shaped dome. As with his other views of lakeside hamlets, Klimt plays with the repetition of simple shapes across the surface of the canvas.

The arches of the boathouse are picked up again in the trees above and in the pointed arches of the church itself. The red of the dome is echoed in windows and roofs throughout the picture, providing bright focal points to keep the eye moving across the picture surface. Klimt needed to add these red highlights to attract the viewer's attention since there are no lines of perspective, which usually lead the eye to a vanishing point somewhere on the horizon. Nor is there any sort of meandering perspective of the kind employed by such great landscapists as Claude Lorrain (1600-82), which leads the eye on a wandering path through a scene to arrive finally at a glowing sky. The dramatic frontal positioning of the buildings presents a series of barriers, preventing the eye from rushing off into the distance and encouraging the viewer to look for ways around the trees and buildings. The telescopic effect is similar to scenes of busy traffic in films, when the buildings and cars seem impossibly close together.