Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — Hand-Painted Oil Reproduction

Public-domain scan of the original shown for reference. Your canvas is hand-painted to order and photographed for your approval before shipping.

Reference image: Adele Bloch-Bauer.jpg — Gustav Klimt, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Your canvas is hand-painted to order.

Price by canvas size

Every Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I we paint is made to order, so the price tracks the canvas size and the amount of brushwork involved. These are the sizes our customers order most:

Estimates only — the final quote depends on your exact size, frame and shipping destination. Framing and shipping are quoted separately. Duties and import taxes are the buyer's responsibility (DAP).

Why a print cannot do this painting

The painting sets up a deliberate collision. The face, shoulders and hands are modelled in ordinary oil with soft, careful flesh tones; the dress and background are gold leaf and flat decorative units with no modelling at all. The eye reads the face as a person and the rest as material, and the tension between the two is the whole picture.

Prints even the two out. The face goes slightly waxy, the ornament goes slightly flat, and the collision disappears — you are left with a pretty gold rectangle. Painted by hand, the face stays alive and the gold stays metallic, so the painting keeps its argument.

There is a test we encourage buyers to use on any "oil painting" they are offered: run a fingernail very gently across the surface. A hand-painted canvas feels like terrain. A print feels like glass.

The painting itself

Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of a Vienna sugar industrialist and the only sitter Klimt painted twice. The portrait was looted by the Nazis in 1938, was the subject of a decade-long restitution case, and returned to her heirs in 2006 — the story behind the film Woman in Gold.

Our painters begin with the flesh tones, which have to be right before any gold goes down, because the gold is worked around and over them in thin layers. The triangle of ornament at the bottom of the dress and the eye-shaped motifs on the cloak are painted as flat units, in the order Klimt laid them, so the surface stays crisp rather than muddy.

How our painters reproduce it

Our studio is in Dafen Oil Painting Village, Shenzhen — the centre of hand-painted oil reproduction for more than thirty years. A Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I here is not traced, projected or transferred. The painter works freehand from a high-resolution reference, in layers:

1. Composition and ground. The canvas is toned and the main forms laid out in a thin underpainting, matching the original proportions to your chosen size.
2. Colour build-up. The palette is mixed in oil, not acrylic — only oil gives the same depth, slow blending and the slightly translucent glow the original depends on.
3. Impasto and surface passes. The signature strokes go on last, loaded with paint, following the direction of the original's brushwork. This is the slowest and most skilful stage.
4. Drying and inspection. Layered oil needs days to set properly. We let it. Then the finished canvas is checked against the reference for colour, composition and stroke character.

Where it hangs best

Known as the Woman in Gold — a face painted realistically, held inside a field of pure ornament. Rooms our customers choose most often:

• Bedroom — the gold warms a room without the painting becoming loud
• Living room above a sofa — a known image that carries a story
• Dressing room or study — the ornament is worth looking at closely
• Hospitality — hotel suites, lounges and gallery corridors

Framing

Choose gold to echo the original's warmth, matte black for a contemporary room, walnut for a traditional interior, or no frame at all as a gallery-wrap canvas ready to hang. Frames are quoted separately and packed with corner protection.

How ordering works

1. Tell us the painting, size and frame. WhatsApp is fastest — include a wall photo if you want sizing advice.
2. Get an exact quote. Usually within the hour, with the timeline confirmed in writing.
3. 70% deposit starts the painting. Paid by bank transfer, PayPal, credit card or Wise.
4. We send photographs of the finished painting. You review it before anything ships. If something clearly does not match your order notes, tell us and we adjust it.
5. Pay the 30% balance, then we ship. Tracked worldwide courier, rolled in a rigid tube or crated if framed.

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