Klimt-Schubert am Klavier

1899, 200 x 150 cm, Öl (verbrannt) Aquarell wo?

Destroyed by a fire set by retreating German forces in 1945 at Schloss Immendorf (ditto Fakultätsbilder)

Greek industrialist Nikolaus Dumba (Palais Dumba Wien Parkring) commissioned Hans Makart - a then fashionable painter -

Franz Matsch and Gustav Klimt to decorate three rooms in his luxury apartment with paintings and also furniture. Klimt was

given the music room. A watercolour survives, showing how he envisaged the paintings in relation to the decoration of the

rest of the room. While one of the canvases, Music II, is an allegorical work harking back to earlier paintings, the other,

Schubert at the Piano, is highly innovative. Presumably Dumba requested that Schubert be the subject of the picture; he

was certainly popular at the time and he also happened to be Klimt's own favourite composer. The woman on the left is

Marie Zimmermann, one of Klimt's mistresses, who gave birth to two sons by the artist.

Vandalismus

Musik