Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi

The Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, painted around 1913–14, is one of Klimt's most exuberantly coloured late portraits and the adult counterpart to his famous portrait of the sitter's daughter Mäda. Eugenia Primavesi was the wife of Otto Primavesi, a banker and businessman who became one of Klimt's most important late patrons, helping to finance the Wiener Werkstätte after its financial difficulties. The Primavesi family's sustained patronage was critical for both Klimt and for the broader Vienna Werkstätte circle that included Josef Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche. By 1913 Klimt was moving beyond the strict gold-and-ornament aesthetic of his Golden Phase toward a looser, more painterly approach influenced by Henri Matisse and the Fauves, whose works he had encountered through international exhibitions. The extraordinary flowering dress in this portrait — an explosion of botanical motifs — reflects his engagement with the Werkstätte's textile and pattern design vocabulary. The painting is now in Japan, at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, one of several Klimt masterworks that passed to Japanese collections during the art market boom of the 1980s.

The dress is painted with broad, gestural strokes of pure, high-keyed colour — pinks, reds, yellows, greens — creating a floral pattern that reads as both dress fabric and abstract colour field. The face retains the careful, naturalistic modelling of his established portrait practice, set in deliberate contrast to the exuberant surface around it.