Lady by the fireplace

In the late 1890s Klimt was looking closely at James McNeill Whistler, the American painter living in London, and above all at his famous portrait of his mother, seated in grey and black. The scholar Alice Strobl traced a run of Klimt's profile drawings from those years back to that picture, and this small canvas belongs with them. A woman leans back in an armchair, her face turned away, her long black dress sinking into the dark until it is hard to tell where she ends. The canvas is much wider than it is tall, about 41 by 66 centimetres, and her reclining pose follows that shape. A drawing he made for Ver Sacrum, the magazine of the newly founded Vienna Secession, shows a woman sitting in almost the same way. At the far edge of the picture, away from her, a patch of warm red glows.