Portrait of a Lady 1916–1917 CE

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady, painted in 1916–1917, shows a young woman turning to glance over her shoulder with an expression that feels both intimate and slightly distant. Her dark hair is swept up, her cheeks flushed, and a small mole marks her left cheek. She wears a loosely painted blouse scattered with colorful floral motifs against a soft, moss-green background. What makes the picture linger in the mind is not only the woman’s gaze but the knowledge that another portrait of her—dressed differently, wearing a large hat and scarf—lies sealed beneath the surface. The work belongs to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi in Piacenza, Italy. It is one of Klimt’s last completed paintings and one of the most eventful in his entire oeuvre.

From a Viennese Studio in Wartime to an Italian Gallery

Klimt created the painting toward the end of his life, after he had abandoned the glittering gold leaf and dense ornament of his so-called Golden Period. Working in Vienna during the First World War, he adopted a freer, more expressionistic handling of paint. The canvas itself already carried an earlier image. Around 1912 Klimt had painted the same woman in a fashionable hat and boa; after she died suddenly—sources suggest she may have been a lover—he returned to the unfinished or abandoned picture and painted over most of it, keeping the face and background while changing the costume and title. 

The later version was finished in 1916–1917, only months before Klimt’s own death in February 1918. In 1925 the Piacenza collector Giuseppe Ricci Oddi bought the work from the Milanese dealer Luigi Scopinich and later placed it in the public gallery he founded, which opened in 1931.

The Schoolgirl Who Noticed What Experts Had Missed

In 1996 an eighteen-year-old high-school student named Claudia Maga was studying Klimt for an exam when she noticed that the Piacenza portrait looked almost identical to a photograph of a “lost” 1912 painting known as Portrait of a Young Lady. She traced the older image, enlarged it, and laid it over the gallery picture; the faces and the turn of the head matched exactly. X-rays soon confirmed that Klimt had reused the canvas. 

Ten months later, on 22 February 1997, the painting vanished during preparations for an exhibition that was meant to celebrate this discovery. The empty frame was found on the museum roof beside a skylight too small for the canvas to have passed through. A convincing fake later turned up in a package addressed to the fugitive politician Bettino Craxi. For twenty-two years the original was considered one of the world’s most famous stolen pictures. Then, on 10 December 2019, gardeners clearing ivy from an exterior wall of the same gallery opened a small metal hatch and found the painting inside a black plastic bag. Experts authenticated it in January 2020 by matching the hidden underpainting, stamps on the reverse, and other technical evidence. The work later travelled to Rome and Seoul before returning to Piacenza in April 2026, just as the gallery reopened after renovation.

Late Style, Double Image, and the End of an Era

The painting occupies a distinctive place in Klimt’s development. By 1916 he had moved away from the mosaic-like surfaces and gold that made his earlier society portraits iconic. The brushwork here is broader and more emotional, closer to Expressionism, while the decorative pattern on the blouse still carries a faint echo of Japonisme. Because it is the only known instance in which Klimt painted one finished portrait directly over another, the work has become a unique document of his working method and of the personal circumstances that prompted him to reuse a canvas. 

The hidden earlier version, with its Belle Époque hat and scarf, belongs to a slightly earlier moment in his late style; the visible version already points toward the even looser, more colorful pictures he left unfinished at his death. In the wider history of Viennese modernism the portrait also stands as a quiet witness to the last years of the Austro-Hungarian world that Klimt had portrayed so lavishly.

Oil, Canvas, and What the X-Rays Revealed

The work is executed in oil on canvas and measures 60 by 55 centimetres (23.6 by 21.7 inches). Technical examination in 1996 and again after the 2019 recovery showed that Klimt did not scrape away the earlier painting; he simply covered the hat, scarf and much of the clothing while leaving the face and large parts of the background intact. Infrared and X-ray images therefore still reveal the outline of the 1912 composition beneath the present surface. The later paint layers are thinner and more freely applied than the gold-laden works of a decade earlier, consistent with Klimt’s wartime practice of working more economically and more directly.

From Private Collection to Public Treasure—and Back Again

Giuseppe Ricci Oddi acquired the painting in 1925 and installed it first in his family palazzo before transferring it to the gallery he donated to the city of Piacenza. It remained there until the 1997 theft. After its recovery in the museum wall in 2019 it was authenticated, exhibited in Rome in 2021 and later in Seoul, and returned to the Ricci Oddi Gallery on 4 April 2026. It now hangs once more in the collection that has owned it for a century, the only Klimt portrait in Italy and the only known double portrait in the artist’s entire body of work.