Woman Seated

Description

Gustav Klimt
Women Seated
(Possible study for Portrait of Amalie Zuckerlandl)
1913–1914
Graphite on paper
Gift of the Ernst Pulgram and Frances McSparran Collection, 2007/2.94
This sketch for the portrait of Amalie Zuckerlandl
provides a rare example of the artist spending at least some time on the sitter’s facial features in a preparatory drawing, if only schematically. Commissioned in 1913 or 1914, the portrait was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, when the sitter and her family moved to Lemberg. The preparatory sketches for this work are divided into two distinct groups, work done before the war, as in this example, with Zuckerlandl posing seated in a fur-trimmed dress, and after. Klimt pulled from a wide range of influences in his portrait painting; here, the artist has begun to work on variations of the sitter’s pose that resemble Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1806 portrait
of Madame Rivière.