The Hydra

Klimt made this on a small sheet of parchment, only about 50 centimetres tall, worked in watercolour, gold and tempera. It belongs to the years after 1905, when he had broken with Vienna's Secession artists and was painting some of his most private, heavily ornamented work. Two women float together, their bodies stretched and merged into one sinuous form that trails off like a water snake, which is why the picture is usually called Water Serpents. Around them Klimt lays flat fields of gold and pattern, so the figures seem pressed into a decorative surface rather than set in any real water. It was never made for a public wall. Pieces like this passed among the collectors and patrons who could take Klimt's frank eroticism, at a moment when official Vienna was turning against him.