Die Jungfrau

Klimt finished this in 1913, near the end of his life and a few years after the gold had drained out of his work. There is no gold leaf here at all, just a riot of pattern and colour. Seven women lie tangled together in a single sleeping mass, their bodies dissolving into a swirl of flowers and folded cloth so that you can barely tell where one ends and the next begins. The girl at the centre, in blue, is the one awake to change. The figures around her are usually read as the stages a woman moves through, the whole cluster caught mid-dream. Prague bought the painting in 1914, the year after it was made, for twenty thousand crowns, straight out of an exhibition. It was among the last things Klimt completed before he died in 1918.