About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
The composition presents two reclining female figures intertwined within a dense, undulating landscape, its horizontal format emphasising their languid posture and the unbroken flow of the surrounding environment.
Two figures appear in the foreground in full nudity, while two more emerge in the upper right corner, only their heads visible.
Female nudes glide past the observer with a dream-like gaze, their red, nymph-like hair flecked with magically shimmering floral creatures.
The palette is rich with blues, purples, yellows, and gold, creating a harmonious and luxurious effect central to the Art Nouveau aesthetic.
The figures are rendered with a pale, almost ethereal quality that contrasts sharply with the vibrant tapestry of flora enveloping them — depicted not as discrete individuals but as integral components of their natural setting, their bodies merging seamlessly with the surrounding vegetation.
The painting was begun in 1904 and finished in either 1906 or 1907, placing it squarely at the height of Klimt's Golden Phase, alongside *The Kiss* and *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I*. It was the last in a series of works — including *Moving Water* (1898), *Medicine* (1901), *Goldfish* (1902), and *Water Serpents I* (1904) — that all featured water nymphs as their subjects.
The unambiguously intimate embrace of his figures would perhaps have been unacceptable presented as a straight portrait; by giving the work an allegorical theme and adorning every surface with gold and pattern, Klimt was able to show the painting to Vienna without fear of censorship.
The painting, and its charged subject matter, is seen as a precursor to later works such as *Women Friends* (1917), which displayed such relationships more openly. Its provenance is as dramatic as the canvas itself: after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, *Water Serpents II* was confiscated from its Jewish owner Jenny Steiner, passing into the hands of Nazi filmmaker Gustav Ucicky, rumoured to be one of Klimt's illegitimate children.
This is a painting for rooms that earn silence — a dark, considered library, a bedroom with low evening light, a living space that prizes sensuality over spectacle. The figures are rendered with a softness that contrasts with vibrant patterning, highlighting Klimt's ability to weave the human form with abstract decorative elements seamlessly, which means the longer you look, the more the composition reveals. It speaks to a viewer drawn to work with psychological depth beneath decorative beauty — someone
