Portrait of Ria Munch III

Portrait of Ria Munch III (1917–18) represents Klimt's late, incomplete portrait practice — he left multiple canvases unfinished at his death, among them several portraits of women that were in various stages of development. Ria Munch was the subject of multiple portrait sessions with Klimt across several years; this third version was likely still in progress when Klimt suffered his stroke in January 1918. The serial revisiting of a single sitter reflects both the deliberate, iterative nature of Klimt's studio practice and the particular intensity of his engagement with individual female subjects over extended periods. By 1917 Klimt's late style combined the ornamental richness of his Golden Phase with a new gestural looseness in the figure — an awareness of Schiele and Kokoschka's Expressionist influence visible in the increasingly free brushwork of his final years. The incompleteness of works like this portrait provides an unusually direct view of Klimt's working method: the progression from thinly blocked-in areas to the densely worked passages he completed first, the face, reveals the hierarchical logic of his studio practice.

Oil on canvas with the characteristic late Klimt combination of thinly sketched background areas and more fully realised figural passages. The face typically shows the greatest technical elaboration — warm glazes built up over a carefully prepared ground — while dress and background remain in various states of incompleteness, offering insight into the layering sequence Klimt employed.