Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Adele Bauer was from a wealthy Jewish Viennese family. Her father was a director of the Wiener Bankverein, the seventh largest bank in Austria-Hungary, and the general director of the Oriental Railway. In the late 1890s Adele met Klimt, and may have begun a relationship with him. Opinion is divided on whether Adele and Klimt had an affair. Adele’s parents arranged a marriage with Ferdinand Bloch, a banker and sugar manufacturer; Adele’s older sister had previously married Ferdinand’s older brother. The couple shared a love of art, and patronised several artists, collecting primarily nineteenth-century Viennese paintings and modern sculpture. In mid-1903 Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife; he wished to give the piece to Adele’s parents as an anniversary present that October. Klimt undertook more extensive preparations for the portrait than any other piece he worked on. Much of the portrait was undertaken by an elaborate technique of using gold and silver leaf and then adding decorative motifs in bas-relief using gesso, a paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk or gypsum. The frame for the painting, covered in gold leaf, was made by the architect Josef Hoffmann. Klimt finished the work by 1907.