Lady with a Muff

Klimt painted this near the end of his life, around 1916, a couple of years before he died. The gold of his famous portraits is gone. Instead there is a woman half-hiding her face behind a black fur muff, set against a hot, swirling background dotted with little faces, the sort of colour he had picked up from East Asian prints and screens. Then the painting vanished. It was last shown publicly in Vienna in 1926, and afterwards disappeared into a private Czech collection, where it stayed hidden for the better part of a century. Only in 2014 did its anonymous owner bring it out and lend it to the National Gallery in Prague, where people could look at it again.