Gustav Klimt

Estate of the artist
Hermann & Therese Flöge, Vienna (parents of the sitter; probably acquired from the above)
Gertrude Flöge, Vienna (the sitter, by descent from the above)
Private Collection, Vienna (a gift from the above)
Private Collection, Europe (by descent from the above; sale: Sotheby's, London, 23rd June 2010, lot 120)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt, Die Zeichnungen, 1912-1918, Salzburg, 1984, vol. III, no. 2633, illustrated p. 137
Tobias G. Natter, Gustav Klimt, The Complete Paintings, Cologne, 2012, no. 101, illustrated in colour p. 445 (titled Portrait of Trude Flöge)

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down and hinged to the mount in two places along the upper edge. The sheet is time stained, with some mount staining to the extreme edges from a previous mount. There are some very gentle creases in places, predominantly to the upper extreme edge, and not visible when framed. This work is in overall very good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The subject of the present work is Gertrude (Trude) Flöge, the young niece of Gustav Klimt’s lifelong companion Emilie Flöge. Between 1900 and 1916 Klimt spent his summers at the Villa Paulick on the Attersee, where Emilie and her brother Hermann Flöge and his daughter Trude also spent their summers. Klimt formed a close relationship with Trude whom he came to look upon as a niece of his own.

There is only a very small number of drawings depicting Trude as a little girl: according to the Catalogue raisonné, there are only five. As Alice Strobl explains, these few portraits of Trude were not meant to be sketches for a possible portrait painting, but rather as a memory of the happy times they spent together. Strobl describes the colouration of Trude’s portraits: ‘the heightening with white … is suited to underline the youth of this character in a very special way’ (Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt, Die Zeichnungen, 1912-1918, Salzburg, 1984, vol. III, p. 130).

From the early days of his artistic career, Klimt established himself as a portraitist, creating commissioned renderings of female members of the Viennese high society and intimate images of his companion Emilie Flöge. He simultaneously made a number of allegorical compositions, treating the human figure with the same stylised and decorative quality that came to dominate his portraits, underscoring a profound affiliation with the Symbolist artists of the late nineteenth century. While the young subject of the present portrait may not be the archetypal Klimtian woman, the compositional arrangement and the overall execution hint at a latent Jugendstil idiom, particularly in the patterning evident in the girl’s hair and the delicate heightening of her dress.