Portrait of Gertrud Löw

In 1902 Klimt was becoming the portrait painter Vienna's wealthy families asked for, and Dr Anton Loew, who ran a large private sanatorium in the city, commissioned this picture of his 19-year-old daughter Gertrud. Klimt chose a canvas more than three times as tall as it is wide and let her pale dress fill almost all of it. When the portrait appeared in his big solo exhibition at the Secession in late 1903, listed simply as a portrait of a young girl, the critic Ludwig Hevesi singled out the four stripes of pale lilac silk wandering down the gauzy fabric. You can follow them from her shoulders towards the hem. The painting hung in the family's entrance hall until 1939, when the Nazis seized the house and Gertrud, by then a widow, fled Vienna. By about 1941 it belonged to Klimt's son Gustav Ucicky, a film director. Only in 2014 did the foundation set up by his widow reach a settlement with Gertrud's heirs, and the portrait was sold at auction in London the following year.