The Knight

The Knight (1905) was designed as a cartoon for a mosaic in the dining room of the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, the total-artwork commission that occupied Klimt from 1905 to around 1911. The Palais Stoclet, designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet, represents the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of the Wiener Werkstätte at its fullest realisation: every surface, from tableware to wall decoration, designed as a unified aesthetic programme. Klimt's contribution, the Stoclet Frieze, features the tree of life, embracing lovers, and flanking figures of expectation and fulfilment. The Knight relates to the same symbolic programme — armoured, resolute, standing at a threshold. The MAK in Vienna, which holds this and related preparatory works, was closely allied with the Werkstätte's reform of applied arts, and its collection of Klimt designs is essential documentation of the intersection between fine art and craft that defined the Secession's later programme.

Executed on cardboard as a preparatory study, the work shows Klimt blocking compositional elements in concentrated colour rather than full finish. The flattened, heraldic quality of the figure reflects the requirements of mosaic translation, where modelling must give way to clear colour fields.