This sketch holds a secret: it is a posthumous portrait. The subject, Maria ("Ria") Munk, had taken her own life several years earlier. Klimt painted a small portrait of the young woman on her deathbed. He made this drawing in preparation for a larger painting of Ria that remained incomplete at Klimt's death in 1918. Though his Viennese Jugendstil practice subsumed the portrait sitter into an opulent decorative program, the downward-tilted head and anxious facial features reveal Klimt's sensitivity to the late sitter's troubled life.

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