Klimt | The Three Ages of Woman

About The Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt

Klimt painted The Three Ages of Woman in 1905, at the height of his golden period, three years before The Kiss. It shows a life in one column: a sleeping child held against her mother, the young woman with her eyes closed and flowers in her hair, and beside them an old woman turned away, hand over her face, her body drawn with a frankness that shocked Vienna.

The picture works by contrast. Mother and child are wrapped in a mantle of Klimt's decorative pattern, circles and flowers in blue, gold and lilac, so that they seem to float inside it. The old woman gets no pattern at all: just loose grey hair, sagging skin and a dark veil, painted with unsparing realism. Behind them a silvery, mottled ground and a band of black hold the whole thing still. It is one of the few Klimt paintings that faces old age directly, and it is the more moving for the tenderness of the young mother beside it.

The painting won the gold medal at the 1911 International Exhibition in Rome and was bought for the Italian state the following year. It has hung in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome ever since, which is why it is less familiar than Klimt's Vienna pictures and often a discovery for people who know only The Kiss.

Own a hand-painted The Three Ages of Woman

Klimt's pattern is built up in layers, with the circles and flowers laid over the figures in real paint that catches the light. That is what gives his golden-period pictures their glow in a room, and it is lost the moment they are printed flat. Hand-painted in oils on canvas, the mantle around the mother and child has depth again. Choose your size above, then stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled canvas to frame yourself.