Family

Of all Klimt's paintings, this is the only one in which he made poverty his subject, and people in his day read the figures as a family living on the margins of the city. A young mother has fallen asleep with her two small children. All three are buried in a heap of dark blankets that runs into the darkness around them, so only the faces seem to glow. Look closely and those faces are built from separate strokes of yellow, blue and pink. Infrared photographs show that he painted them first, then laid dark glazes over everything else, covering part of the mother's face as he went. The lighter rectangle behind her is probably a window. Klimt worked on the picture around 1909 and 1910, and it came to the Belvedere in 2012 as a bequest from the Vienna collector Peter Parzer.