Two Girls with an Oleander

Klimt was still in the decorating trade when he painted this. With his brother Ernst and their partner Franz Matsch he ran a company that took on theatre ceilings and staircase murals, and in 1890 and 1891 the three of them were on scaffolding inside the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, filling the spandrels above the main stair. The shape of this canvas comes out of that trade. It is about 55 centimetres high and 128 wide, the proportions of a panel made to go above a door. Two girls stand beside an oleander in a tub, in daylight, in a place you could walk into, which is unusual in Klimt. He was looking hard at English painting in these years, at the Pre-Raphaelites above all. In 1892 his father and then his brother died within months of each other, the company broke up, and Klimt painted very little for the next few years.