Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was born in Baumgarten, then a suburb of Vienna, on 14 July 1862, the second of seven children of a gold engraver. From 1876 to 1883 he studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Arts, where he trained as a decorative painter. With his brother Ernst and a fellow student he then worked on murals for public buildings, including the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and in 1888 received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Joseph.
In 1897 Klimt and a circle of artists broke away from the conservative Vienna Artists’ Association to form the Vienna Secession, and he was elected its first president. His ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna caused a scandal, and in 1902 he showed the Beethoven Frieze at the Secession’s fourteenth exhibition. He later left the Secession and his years of public commissions ended. The paintings of his “golden phase” followed, in which gold leaf, dense ornament and the female figure come together, as in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 and The Kiss of 1908.
Klimt painted women with unusual frankness and sensuality, and landscapes in the same shimmering, patterned style. He suffered a stroke in January 1918, caught pneumonia, and died in Vienna on 6 February 1918, aged fifty-five. He is buried at Hietzing Cemetery.