Portrait of Sonja Knips, 1889

The Portrait of Sonja Knips was in many senses a breakthrough painting for Gustav Klimt. The period preceding it - some five years of relative inactivity - had been one of consolidation and growth, as the artist slowly weaned himself from his academic background and struggled toward his own revolutionary style. The portrait marked a firm break with the glamorous - but implicitly decadent - world of the theater, in which he had made his early name, and his first significant entry into the social stratum that fostered the rise of the Secession and later the Wiener Werkstatte. As a privately commissioned work, the painting also heralded Klimt's progressive withdrawal from the public arena of his previous activity as a muralist. It was the first in the long series of portraits depicting society ladies that was to become the mainstay of the artist's later reputation and economic well-being. Whereas formerly his work had been more or less evenly divided between male and female subjects, he