A Guide to Gustav Klimt's Lesser-Known Paintings

Feature image: Gustav Klimt, Garden landscape with hilltop (detail), 1916 via Google Arts & Culture

Gustav Klimt is best known for The Kiss (1907-08), the gold-leaf embrace that made him the poster artist for an entire era of Viennese modernism. While his forest and garden paintings have become better known in their own right, with Birch Forest (1903) selling for $104,585,000 at Christie's in 2022, his portraiture has taken the auction world by storm with even more outrageous numbers. Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) (1917-18) set the European auction record for the artist, selling for $108.4 million at Sotheby's in 2023.

That record held for barely two years. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby's in November 2025, the most expensive Modern artwork ever sold at auction, and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) remains one of the most expensive paintings ever sold, auctioned by the Bloch-Bauer family at Christie's in 2006, where Oprah Winfrey bought it for $87.9 million before selling it privately in 2016 for $150 million to an anonymous buyer. The paintings below are mostly portraits, with a few other lesser-known works that stand out within Klimt's larger body of work, traced in order from academic realism to the pattern-heavy, gold-laced style that still divides opinion today.

Klimt painted Lady with Cape and Hat in Front of a Red Background right as the Vienna Secession was forming, and it still leans on the darker, more painterly style he trained in before he broke from the conservative Künstlerhaus. The sitter emerges out of a loosely brushed red background, her face lit while the rest of her dissolves into black. It's a portrait built on shadow and restraint of a very different kind than the Klimt most people picture, closer to Whistler than to the gold-ground work that came a decade later.

Girl in the Foliage catches Klimt experimenting with the loose, high-key brushwork associated with Impressionism, a style he rarely returned to. The young woman is set against a thick screen of greenery rendered in short, visible strokes, her white blouse bright against the foliage. It reads almost like a plein air study, and it's a useful reminder that Klimt's early instincts weren't nearly as ornamental as his later reputation suggests.

By the time Klimt painted Portrait of Marie Henneberg, the wife of a German industrialist, he had begun to fold pattern and symbolism into otherwise conventional society portraiture. Henneberg sits stiffly upright, but the space around her is already crowding with the kind of decorative motifs, florals, and abstract shapes that would eventually take over his portraits entirely. It sits right at the hinge between his early and mature styles.

Life is a Struggle, also called Golden Rider, shows a knight in gold armor pushing forward against a snake blocking his path, a pose Klimt lifted from Albrecht Dürer's Knight, Death and the Devil (1513). He painted it not long after his ceiling paintings at the University of Vienna were denounced as pornographic, and the knight's stubborn advance reads as a fairly direct stand-in for his own situation at the time. The armor and helmet were modeled on actual 15th-century pieces held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the gold leaf covering the knight, his tack, and the ground beneath the horse's hooves anticipates the full Golden Phase by several years. It was purchased early by Karl Wittgenstein, the industrialist whose family would go on to become some of Klimt's most important patrons, including commissioning the portrait below.

Karl Wittgenstein commissioned Portrait of Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein as a wedding gift for his daughter, the sister of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Klimt painted her in profile against a flat, geometric backdrop, her moiré dress rendered so thinly in places that the underdrawing shows through. It's one of the clearest examples of Klimt treating a portrait as a study in pattern and flatness rather than likeness, years before that approach became his signature.

Portrait of a Girl is a quieter, more intimate work, a young woman in a dark hat and gloves turning to glance back at the viewer over a bare shoulder. Less documented than Klimt's major society commissions, it shows him working at a smaller, more informal scale, closer to sketch than statement.

Friedericke Maria Beer had already been painted by Egon Schiele in 1914, and she wanted a companion piece from Klimt. She brought him a dress made from Wiener Werkstätte silk and a fur coat she was proud of, which Klimt painted inside out so the patterned lining would show. Behind her, he built an imagined Asian screen from motifs drawn from his own collection, including battling horsemen lifted from a Korean vase, a clear nod to the war raging across Europe. Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer is one of Klimt's most densely patterned late portraits, with the sitter nearly dissolving into the surrounding decoration.

Portrait of a Lady depicts a woman in a wide black hat, seen from behind as she turns to look back at the viewer, her face rendered with the loose, almost unfinished quality that marks Klimt's final years. Its attribution and even the sitter's identity have been debated over time, which has kept it further outside the spotlight than works with firmer provenance.

Baby (Cradle) shows an infant nearly buried in patterned blankets, layers of fabric in gold, blue, and green piled so high that only a small sliver of face pushes through at the top. It's one of the last works he completed before he died, and it shows him applying the same dense, decorative language he used on wealthy patrons to something far more tender and anonymous. Now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., it's become one of his most quietly beloved late paintings.

Klimt was still working on Amalie Zuckerkandl when he died in early 1918, and the painting was left visibly unfinished; parts of the canvas are bare, others only roughed in. Zuckerkandl was a friend of Adele Bloch-Bauer and was later murdered in the Holocaust. The painting has been at the center of a long-running restitution dispute between her family and the Austrian state ever since. It's an unsettling note to end on, a portrait that never got to be finished by the artist or fully resolved by history.

What actually ties this roster together is that each painting caught Klimt testing an idea in private before he pushed it all the way in the work everyone recognizes. The loose brushwork, the crowding pattern, the gold leaf, all of it shows up here first, in smaller and quieter forms, years before it hardened into the style people now think of as his. Individually, none of these paintings made the auction headlines his most famous works did, but together they trace exactly how Klimt got there.

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