Portrait of Marie Henneberg

Portrait of Marie Henneberg (1901–02) places Klimt at the height of his post-Secession portraiture, when his approach to depicting Viennese women of the educated bourgeoisie had crystallised into a distinctive formula: psychologically charged face and hands emerging from expansive, decoratively treated dress and background. Marie Henneberg was the wife of Hugo Henneberg, a leading figure in the Viennese Pictorialist photography movement and an associate of Klimt's circle; she was herself a photographer. The portrait was shown at exhibitions connected to the Secession milieu. Klimt's relationship with his female subjects during this period was shaped by the broader Viennese fin-de-siècle discourse about femininity, the femme fatale, and the psychological depths beneath social surfaces — a discourse in which Freud and Klimt were parallel figures, both probing Vienna's bourgeois interior life. The work is held at the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle, Germany. The white ground of the dress and background, interrupted only by the tonal modelling of the face, anticipates the more radical dissolution of figure into ornamental field that Klimt would achieve in the fully developed Golden Phase works of 1907–08.

Oil on canvas with an almost monochromatic ground — white, cream, and pale grey — against which the sitter's face is the sole warm accent. Klimt applies paint thinly across the background, building up impasto selectively in the facial modelling, creating a surface that is simultaneously flat and sculpturally alive.