Hermine Gallia
Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862–1918)
c. 1904
- Medium
- black chalk with graphite on light brown laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 45.6 x 31.2 cm (17 15/16 x 12 5/16 in.)
- Culture
- Austria
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Henry H. Hawley
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Gustav Klimt created this drawing in preparation for a painted portrait, now in the collection of the National Gallery, London. Both depict Hermine Gallia, née Hamburger, who belonged to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. Through vanguard circles in the city, she met the artist and commissioned a canvas of her own likeness. This sheet may have been drawn from life, given its loose and sketchlike facture, seemingly meant to quickly record Gallia's form on the elaborate white dress in which she posed.
