Die Erfüllung

Between about 1905 and 1911 Klimt designed a mosaic frieze for the dining room of a private mansion going up in Brussels, the Palais Stoclet, built for a Belgian banker with money to burn. This is his full-scale working cartoon for one panel of it, kept at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. Craftsmen of the Wiener Werkstatte later translated the design into marble, gold, enamel and semi-precious stones. Fulfillment shows a couple sealed in an embrace, the man's patterned robe swirling around them, and it is closely related to The Kiss, which Klimt was painting in the very same years. Because the finished frieze is set into the walls of a house that is almost never open, this drawing is as close as most of us will get to it.