Portrait of Hermine Gallia

Portrait of Hermine Gallia, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1904, depicts the wife of a Viennese Jewish industrialist and cultural patron. Klimt's portraits of Viennese society women of the early twentieth century established a distinct pictorial type: figures emerging from elaborately decorated surfaces in which the distinction between figure and ornament is deliberately blurred. Hermine Gallia's portrait was commissioned in the context of the Gallia family's broader patronage of Viennese Secession art. The painting is now in the National Gallery in London, having left Austria following the family's persecution in the Nazi period.

Klimt renders Hermine Gallia with the combination of careful face and figure observation and ornamental surface elaboration that characterizes his mature portraits. The dress becomes an almost abstract field of decorative patterning while the face and hands are painted with precise, almost classical modelling. The contrast between these modes gives his portraits their distinctive tension.