Portrait of the pianist Joseph Pembauer

In 1890 friends in Vienna founded a society named after Josef Pembaur, a composer and conductor from Innsbruck who had studied under Bruckner. Its members kept a regulars' table at the Spatenbräu, a beer hall, and Klimt made this portrait to hang in their room. The painter Franz Matsch, who shared a studio with him, recalled it showing Pembaur "with a golden lyre and laurels". The face is so exact that the Klimt Foundation thinks it was taken from a photograph. The broad gold border is drawn flat, like a Greek vase: Apollo playing his lyre on an Ionic column, dolphins, stars, a tripod and, at the bottom, a shovel marked G S, the sign of the Spaten brewery. When the beer hall closed the picture apparently went to the society's founder, and the Ferdinandeum bought it at the sale of his estate in 1936.