Portrait de Friederike Maria Beer

Friederike Maria Beer turned up at Klimt's studio in November 1915 and he tried to send her away, telling her Egon Schiele had only just painted her. He took the commission anyway and worked through about 40 studies before settling on a pose.

The finished portrait is from 1916, the third year of the war. Behind her a cavalry battle runs right across the background, horsemen lifted from a Korean vase Klimt kept in the studio among the Chinese and Japanese things he collected and mined for pattern.

The dress is Wiener Werkstatte, hand-blocked silk, and Klimt made her wear the fur jacket over it inside out so the printed lining showed. The dress still exists, in the costume collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Beer left Vienna in the 1930s, ran a gallery in Manhattan, sold the portrait in London in the late 1960s, and died in Hawaii in 1980.