Baby (Cradle) (1917-1918 CE)

At first glance Gustav Klimt’s Baby (Cradle) does not look like a portrait at all. A pale infant’s face rises from a mountain of quilts, ruffles, and patterned cloth; a small hand appears, then disappears again into folds of orange, blue, green, yellow, and violet. The child is there, alert and looking out, but the painting’s real subject is the fabric that nearly swallows it. Painted in 1917 and 1918, in the last months of Klimt’s life, the work turns a nursery scene into a square field of ornament. It hangs today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., one of the few Klimt oils in an American public collection, and it remains one of his strangest and most intimate late pictures.

Painted Against the Clock, Then Left Behind

Klimt began the canvas on 11 August 1917. That speed was unusual for him. Within weeks he had to send work to the Austrian Art Exhibition at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm, and in postcards to Emilie Flöge he grumbled that the pictures would not be ready—and that if they were, they would not be good. He sent them anyway: thirteen oils and eighteen drawings. Baby hung on the north wall of the Klimt room, still barely dry. After the show closed in October he brought the canvas home and kept working. Photographs from Stockholm and the version now in Washington differ in small but telling ways.

The historical setting was grim. The First World War was in its fourth year; the Habsburg world that had made Klimt famous was collapsing. On 11 January 1918 he suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. Pneumonia followed in a city already hit by influenza. He died in Vienna on 6 February 1918, aged fifty-five. In the garden studio on Feldmühlgasse in Hietzing, unfinished canvases still stood on the easels: The Bride, Lady with a Fan, and Baby (Cradle). The National Gallery dates the painting 1917/1918. Whether one calls it finished depends on how much weight one gives those last unpainted passages. Many visitors never notice them.

Mixed Feelings, a Quick Study, and a Studio of Interrupted Lives

Klimt himself admitted to “extremely mixed feelings” about the new child picture. He had not wanted to start another canvas so fast. Scholars suspect he agreed because Stockholm needed a fresh note beside the more sombre works already chosen for the room, including a 1915 portrait of Emilie Flöge’s mother. The infant’s bright, protected presence would have answered those darker neighboring pictures.

A drawing now in the Leopold Museum in Vienna shows how directly he prepared the pose. Reclining Baby, Bedded on a Cushion. Study for Baby, 1917, is executed in pencil, white chalk, and red and blue crayon on Japanese paper, measuring 36.9 × 55.7 cm (14 1/2 × 21 15/16 in.). The upward gaze, the right hand, and the fall of the cloth all migrate into the oil. The cataloguer Alice Strobl also linked some of Klimt’s baby studies to the unfinished Bride, where a sleeping infant with closed eyes appears among adult figures. The two late canvases share a motif even if they do not share a mood.

People often ask whether the child is one of Klimt’s own. He never married. His companion of nearly three decades was the fashion designer Emilie Flöge; they had no children together. He fathered children with some of his models—at least six are documented, born to three mothers, two of whom died young. After his death as many as fourteen claims were rumored, though that figure is not officially proven. Nothing identifies the infant in Baby (Cradle). The painting keeps its sitter anonymous, which is part of its force: this is not a society portrait but a type, a beginning.

When Pattern Takes the Place of Gold

By 1917 Klimt had left the gold-leaf splendor of The Kiss and Adele Bloch-Bauer I behind. In the late work, saturated color does what metal once did. Complementary pairs sit side by side until the surface vibrates. The composition is a square containing a great triangle whose apex is the baby’s head; the side spaces become further triangles. Space is flattened. The human figure shrinks to a detail inside the ornament. Japanese prints and textiles, which filled the Hietzing studio along with kimonos and bolts of cloth, help explain that hierarchy: pattern first, person second. 

Symbolically the picture belongs with Klimt’s lifelong meditation on the cycle of life. Death and Life had already shown humanity huddled under patterned coverlets while Death waits. Here the coverlets return, but Death is absent. What remains is protection so abundant it becomes almost threatening. The child is safe and nearly erased at once. That double feeling—tenderness and overwhelm—is the painting’s quiet argument. It is also one of the rare late oils in which the sitter is not upright. 

Canvas, Color, and a Nearly Square Field

Baby (Cradle) is oil on canvas. The painted surface measures 110.9 × 110.4 cm (43 11/16 × 43 7/16 in.). The format is effectively square, which is unusual in Klimt’s portrait production and essential to the triangular pile of bedding. The painting is unsigned.

Under the finished passages, drawing remains visible in places, which is one reason the work is sometimes described as unfinished. Klimt’s late method was to lay in the figure and then build ornament in successive layers. Where those layers stop, the process shows. The brushwork in the quilts is looser than in the golden portraits of a decade earlier: short, loaded strokes of contrasting hue rather than meticulous mosaic. White ruffles frame the face like a mane; the flesh is pale, with rose in the cheeks and a warmer note in the lips. No gold leaf is used. 

From the Primavesi Salon to the National Gallery

After Klimt’s death the painting passed through Galerie Nebehay in Vienna and was sold in 1919 to Otto Primavesi, who died in 1926, and his wife Eugenia. In 1928 Hugo or Otto Bernatzik acquired it in Vienna together with other works from Eugenia Primavesi. The architect and stage designer Josef Urban then brought it to New York. By about 1959 it was associated with Galerie St. Etienne, the gallery Otto and Franziska Kallir built after fleeing Austria following the Anschluss. The Kallirs included the painting in their 1959 Klimt exhibition; Mrs. Josef Urban is listed as a lender that year, so the transfer of ownership around that moment is slightly blurred in the documents. In 1978 Otto and Franziska Kallir gave the work to the National Gallery of Art, with assistance from the Carol and Edwin Gaines Fullinwider Fund. It has remained there since.