Description
The Original Work
Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss (Der Kuss) between 1907 and 1908, at the height of what is now called his Golden Period — the years when he worked gold leaf directly into the surface of his paintings, a technique he took from the Byzantine mosaics he had seen in Ravenna.
The couple kneel at the edge of a flowering meadow, wrapped in a single ornamented robe: rectangles and blacks and whites on his side, circles and flowers on hers. It is the central work of the Vienna Secession, the movement Klimt helped found in revolt against academic painting, and it has belonged to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna since 1908, when the museum bought it straight off the exhibition wall.
Our Reproduction
This canvas is painted in pure oils on fine-grain linen over a solid pine stretcher. The Kiss is unusually demanding to reproduce because its power lies in the ornament — hundreds of small geometric and floral motifs, each one placed by hand:
- Imprimatura — a linseed-oil ground over the raw linen
- Underpainting — the two figures and the meadow established first
- Body colour — flesh tones and the field of flowers
- Ornamental work — the golden robe built up motif by motif, with metallic pigments worked for the shimmer of the original
- Varnishing — a final UV varnish to protect the colours and the metallic surface
Production takes 10 to 15 business days. Your canvas arrives with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Why Choose This Piece
The near-square format and the concentrated gold make this a piece that holds a wall on its own rather than sitting in a group. It changes noticeably with the light through the day — flat and warm in daylight, genuinely luminous under a lamp — and it remains the most requested painting in the catalogue for weddings and anniversaries, for reasons that need no explaining.
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