Baby (Cradle)

Baby (Cradle), painted in 1917–18, is among Klimt's final works and was left unfinished at his death. The subject represents a remarkable thematic shift within his late career — away from the adult female sitters who had dominated his figurative work toward the universal subject of new life and infancy. The pyramidal mound of fabric, blankets, and swaddling clothes that overwhelms the tiny sleeping infant was an unusual compositional strategy, treating the cradle as a mountain of textile pattern and colour from which a small human face barely emerges. The treatment has been interpreted in the context of Klimt's late preoccupation with the cycle of life, paralleling the aged figures and pregnant women that recur through his allegories. The National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired this work, making it one of the major American holdings of Klimt's painting. The unfinished state of the lower passages again reveals Klimt's habit of working downward from the most important element — here the infant's face — and leaving peripheral areas to be resolved later, as he intended but never completed before his stroke in January 1918.

The infant's tiny face is rendered with the full delicacy of Klimt's mature figure technique, using translucent flesh tones and subtle tonal gradations. The surrounding masses of textile are built with richly varied colour — deep blues, reds, whites, patterned passages — applied in looser, more gestural marks that become increasingly summary toward the canvas edges.