Klimt | Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

About Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

Klimt spent three years on this portrait, finishing it in 1907. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of a Viennese sugar industrialist and the only sitter Klimt ever painted twice. The canvas is worked in oil, silver and gold leaf, and she emerges from the ornament almost reluctantly — face, shoulders and hands rendered in soft flesh tones, everything else dissolved into a field of spirals, triangles and the stylised Egyptian eyes that recur throughout his Golden Period.

The painting's later history is as well known as the image. It was seized from the family by the Nazis in 1938 and hung in Vienna's Belvedere as Woman in Gold — the Jewish sitter's name stripped from her own portrait. It stayed there for nearly sixty years.

Adele's niece Maria Altmann, who had escaped Austria in 1938, brought a restitution claim in her eighties. It reached the United States Supreme Court, and in 2006 an Austrian arbitration panel returned the painting to the family. It sold later that year for US$135 million, then the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I at a glance

• Artist: Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
• Painted: 1903–1907, Vienna
• Also known as: The Woman in Gold
• Movement: Vienna Secession — Klimt's Golden Period
• Original: Neue Galerie, New York
• Medium: Oil, silver and gold leaf on canvas, 138 × 138 cm

Common questions about the Woman in Gold

Own a hand-painted Adele Bloch-Bauer I

This is not a print. Every painting we sell is reproduced in oils on canvas, by hand, by professional artists — no giclée, no computer-generated technique.

What holds this picture together is a collision of two completely different ways of painting. Adele's face, shoulders and those famously nervous hands are modelled in soft, conventional flesh tones with real depth behind them. Everything else — the dress, the chair, the room, the air — is flat pattern pressed right up to the picture surface. She reads as a living person trapped in a mosaic, and the whole effect depends on those two registers staying distinct. Printing renders both at exactly the same flatness and the tension goes. Painted by hand in oils, the face recovers its depth and she steps forward from the gold again.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is square, and the composition sits best in a square or near-square format.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
• 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions.
• Free delivery Australia-wide. Australian owned and operated, with a local contact you can actually reach.

Framing Options: You have 3 choices

Option 1. Choose an outer frame - see images below.

You only need to choose one and the painting will be sent to you framed and ready to hang.

* Below is an example of a customer who chose the Gold Ornate frame

Option 2: Choose a Gallery Wrap Stretched Painting.

If you want the frameless modern gallery wrap look then you only need to choose Stretched Gallery Wrap from the finish option dropdown.

You receive your stretched gallery wrap painting ready to hang - with a hanging wire attached behind.

The back of the Stretched Gallery Wrap looks like the image below - it has a hanging wire!

Option 3: Choose Canvas Only if you want to frame the painting yourself.

Your painting will be sent to you in an art tube - you can then frame it yourself or take it to your local framer.