Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi

By 1913 Gustav Klimt's richest patrons were the Primavesis, a banking and industrial family who bankrolled the Wiener Werkstätte, the Vienna design workshop that dressed the city's avant-garde. He had already painted their young daughter Mäda. Now the husband invited him to paint Eugenia, and Klimt finished her by Christmas and sent the canvas east by express train. She stands in a loose patterned kimono of the kind fashionable in Vienna then, her figure nearly dissolving into a hot yellow field of flowers, with a small oriental bird up in one corner. Klimt died in 1918 with much of this world already unravelling. The Primavesi bank failed in 1926, the family sold its pictures, and this one travelled far enough that it now hangs in a museum in Toyota, Japan.