Portrait de Ria Munk III

Maria Munk, known as Ria, shot herself in 1911, at 24, after a broken engagement. Her grieving family, wealthy Viennese and close to Klimt's circle, asked him to paint her, and he tried three times. The first showed her on her deathbed, and the family rejected it. The second they turned down too. This is the third, begun around 1917, a tall full-length image of the young woman alive again amid a field of flowers. Klimt finished her face and got no further. When he died in February 1918, after a stroke, this canvas was still on his easel, the flowers and drapery only drawn in and loosely washed with colour. You can see exactly where his hand stopped, the completed head floating above a body barely begun.