The Tree of Life (Stoclet Frieze)

Description

Most paintings by Gustav Klimt that reach a wall today are the gilded society portraits, the allegories of kiss and embrace rendered in oil and leaf. This piece comes from a different corner of his career: a working cartoon, drawn at full scale, for a mosaic that craftsmen would later build in enamel, marble, and gold on a wall in Brussels. The Tree of Life Stoclet Frieze reproduction brings that drawing back into paint, restoring it to the medium Klimt usually worked in even though the original never was.

About Tree of Life Stoclet Frieze Reproduction

The sheet concentrates on the heart of the design, where the trunk of the tree breaks apart into golden spirals that loop and double back on themselves across the surface. Small birds, drawn as Horus falcons, perch among the branches, and the Eye of Horus recurs beside clusters of abstracted blossom and leaf, a vocabulary Klimt drew from Egyptian and Byzantine sources he had been studying closely in this period. There is no horizon, no depth in the ordinary sense; the whole field reads as pattern first and tree second, which is exactly how Klimt wanted the finished mosaic to sit in the dining room of the Palais Stoclet.

He made this cartoon, and eight others like it, in 1910 and 1911 as the precise guide the Wiener Werkstatte craftsmen needed to translate his design into stone and gold leaf on site. Working in chalk, gouache, and metallic pigment on paper, he laid down every volute and every Eye of Horus at the scale the mosaic would finally take, so the decorative density you see here is deliberate instruction, not sketch. The nine cartoons stayed in Vienna, in the MAK collection, while the frieze itself remains fixed to the wall it was built for.

The hand-painted reproduction

What we build from that drawing is a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, worked by a painter who studies the gold, bronze, and silver tones of the original cartoon and lays them down in layered brushstrokes rather than a single flat coat. The spirals get their shimmer from passes of metallic pigment built up over a darker ground, so the surface catches light the way raised gold leaf does rather than the way a printed sheet does. Because this is a fine art reproduction painted by hand, the ridges of paint and the small variations between one stroke and the next stay visible on close inspection, giving you a canvas with real depth rather than a photograph of one.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a printed reproduction
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Arrives stretched and ready to hang in gallery-ready presentation
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in two to three weeks, then delivered in five to seven days