Danaë

Description

By 1907, Gustav Klimt had settled into the manner of working that defined his Golden Phase, and it was in this period, with Vienna still absorbing the shock of his university ceiling paintings, that he turned to the myth of Danae for one of his most private pictures. There was no patron waiting for this canvas and no public commission behind it; the painting seems to have been made for its own sake, a square, intimate format unlike the grander portraits he painted for the wives of industrialists that same decade. This Danae reproduction carries that same sense of a picture made on the terms of the artist rather than a client.

About Danae Klimt Reproduction

Klimt shows the princess asleep, her body curled into a tight, almost circular pose that fills the square canvas edge to edge. Her hair spills in deep red across the top of the composition, and a purple veil, marking her royal birth, wraps around her hip and thigh. Beside her, the golden rain of Zeus falls as a stream of coins and discs, and within that gold a small dark rectangle sits, often read as the stylized sign Klimt used for the presence of the god. The ornamental vocabulary of spirals and circles that runs through his famous painting of this period is at its most concentrated here, gold leaf and oil pigment laid side by side until myth and pattern become the same surface.

The palette moves between flesh tones built up in thin, warm glazes and passages of raw gold that catch light differently depending on where the viewer stands, a contrast that gives the picture its charge without a single sharp line separating one zone from another. Painted at 77 by 83 centimetres, the composition later passed through the Galerie Wurthle in Vienna and remains today in a private collection, which makes a reproduction the only way most collectors will ever bring this image into a room.

The hand-painted reproduction

Our studio artists produce this oil painting reproduction by hand, layering glaze over glaze to match the gold-toned palette of Klimt and the dense ornamental surface that defines his Golden Phase. Gold leaf passages, the raised texture of the coin-like discs, and the soft modelling of the sleeping figure are all brushed rather than printed, so the canvas carries real paint depth and the kind of surface variation that a flat print cannot hold. The result suits a collector drawn to the period rather than a casual buyer looking for a quick decorative piece, and it rewards being seen up close, where the handwork shows.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, brushed rather than printed
• Available in multiple sizes, including the original 77 x 83 cm proportions
• Gallery-ready presentation suited to a study or a formal sitting room
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days