Fritza Riedler

Klimt painted Fritza Riedler in 1906, the wife of a Viennese engineering professor, in the years just before the shimmering gold portraits that made his name. She sits upright and still, almost enthroned in a broad pale dress, and behind her head a curved panel of coloured mosaic fans out like a headdress she is not actually wearing. Contemporaries knew the source at once. It recalls the stiff, fan-shaped coiffure of the Spanish infantas that Velazquez had painted more than 200 years earlier, pictures much admired in Vienna at the time. The next year Klimt began his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, where the gold would spread across nearly the whole canvas and all but swallow the sitter.