Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer

Description

Painted between 1914 and 1916, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer shows the young daughter of Viennese art patrons August and Serena Lederer standing full-length within a densely patterned, pyramid-shaped field of ornament. Elisabeth is enveloped in a voluminous, translucent white gown, her upper body set inside an arc of stylized Chinese figures drawn from the artist’s own fascination with East Asian art and textiles.

The nearly six-foot canvas is among the most ambitious of Klimt’s later portraits, pairing a luminous, closely observed rendering of the sitter’s face and hands with a shimmering surrounding tapestry of gold, coral, and jade-toned decoration. Infrared study of the canvas has shown that Klimt reworked the composition as he painted, removing background figures he had originally sketched into the empty space above the patterned rug. Commissioned by the Lederer family, the portrait survived the looting and later destruction of most of the family’s Klimt collection during the Nazi era.

• Original medium: oil on canvas
• Original size: 180.4 x 130.5 cm (71.0 x 51.4 in)
• Subject: Elisabeth Lederer, painted 1914–1916

Our reproduction is a hand-painted oil on canvas, created by a trained studio artist working directly from high-resolution reference images of the original. Layer by layer, the ornamental gold ground, the folds of the diaphanous gown, and the fine detailing of the Chinese figural border are rebuilt in real oil paint on artist-grade canvas, so brushwork and paint texture are genuinely present, not simulated. Each canvas can be produced to your requested size and is shipped unframed, ready for stretching or framing, allowing you to bring one of Klimt’s most lavish and historically resonant portraits into your space as an authentic painted object rather than a printed copy.