Der Goldene Ritter

Klimt showed this at the Vienna Secession in 1903, the year he was moving into the gold that would define his most famous work. The armoured rider owes his pose to a print Klimt knew well, Dürer's Knight, Death and the Devil, though Klimt strips out the menace and lets the gold take over. It is not confined to the obvious things, the helmet and the lance and the horse's harness. He even works it into the ground beneath the hooves, so the whole picture glints. Its alternate title, Life Is a Struggle, hints at something harder under the shimmer. Its first owner was Karl Wittgenstein, the steel magnate whose son Ludwig became one of the century's great philosophers.