The painting was completed in 1907. A portrait that takes him almost three years to complete and of which he makes more studies than of any other painting throughout his entire career.
Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925) was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881, into a wealthy Jewish banking family. A highly-strung and outspoken young woman, Adele, who is denied access to university by sheer fact of her gender, enters into an arranged marriage with business tycoon Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer at the tender age of eighteen to escape her parent’s household.
They remained childless; she worked as a dressmaker. She met the artist Gustav Klimt, of whom Ferdinand was a major patron, and began a relationship with him after he was commissioned to paint her portrait in 1899. She first appears in a sketchy by him in 1900.
Adele was the only woman painted by Klimt on more than one occasion. Apart from the beauty and value of the painting, the daring sea of gold that surrounds Adele and the gentle intimacy with which her fragile figure is portrayed have shrouded the history of this painting in mystery.
She died of meningitis in 1925 at the age of forty-three. In her will, executed two years earlier, she named five of the Klimt painting in dispute (and one other) and asked that Ferdinand donate them to the Austrian Gallery upon his death.
The Lady in Gold in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt
