Portrait of Marie Henneberg 1901–1902 CE

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Marie Henneberg is not a picture that happened to find a wall. It was conceived for a specific place: the tall entrance hall of a new villa on Vienna’s Hohe Warte, hung high above a marble fireplace so that a seated woman would look down on anyone who came in. The canvas is a perfect square, 140 × 140 cm (55.1 × 55.1 in), an unusual choice for a Klimt portrait and one that already tells you the painting was architecture as much as likeness. Marie Henneberg sits in an armchair in an undefined room, dressed with quiet luxury, a bouquet of violets in her hands, her gaze calm and a little distant. The work belongs to the early years of Klimt’s great series of society portraits—before the full blaze of gold leaf—and it still carries the atmosphere of Vienna around 1900: Secession, Wiener Werkstätte, photographers and painters sharing the same hillside.

A Photographer, an Architect, and a Commission

Marie Anna Henneberg was born Maria Hinterhuber in Salzburg on 23 December 1851, daughter of the pharmacist Julius Hinterhuber and Rosalia Baumgartner. After her father’s death she taught in Amstetten in Lower Austria. On 21 August 1888 she married Dr. Hugo Henneberg (1863–1918), a Viennese physicist who had taken his doctorate at Jena and then became one of Austria’s leading pictorialist photographers. With Heinrich Kühn and Hans Watzek he formed the group known as “Das Kleeblatt” (the Cloverleaf); they pioneered colour gum-bichromate printing and moved easily among the Vienna Secession. Hugo was a friend of Klimt. In 1899 the couple even travelled to Venice with Klimt and the painter Carl Moll.

Around 1900–01 Josef Hoffmann designed their house on the Hohe Warte in Döbling, Vienna’s 19th district—part of a small artists’ colony that also included villas for Moll, Koloman Moser and the photographer Friedrich Viktor Spitzer. Hoffmann planned the double-height hall with Klimt’s portrait already in mind. The painting was finished in 1902 and set above a fireplace of Paonazzetto marble, iron and gilded brass.

Unfinished on the Secession Walls

The painting made its public debut before it was even finished. In February and March 1902 it hung, still incomplete, at the 13th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, in the same rooms as pictorialist photographs by Hugo Henneberg and Heinrich Kühn. That pairing was not accidental: painters and art photographers of the circle treated one another as equals and published side by side in “Ver Sacrum”. After that first showing the portrait returned to exhibitions again and again until 1918. Then it almost vanished from view for decades. Only after German reunification did it travel widely again. 

Another quiet story sits in the sketchbooks. Alice Strobl’s catalogue of Klimt drawings lists nine sheets connected with this portrait. In several of them Marie is turned to the right; the armchair is barely indicated, so she seems to float. The museum in Halle has gathered several of those studies, which let you watch Klimt hunting for the pose with a few chalk or pencil lines before he committed it to the large square canvas.

Why the Picture Matters in Klimt’s Vienna

Portrait of Marie Henneberg stands at the beginning of the line of portraits that would make Klimt the painter of Vienna’s grand-bourgeois women. It is still more painterly than the later “golden” works: fabric is observed rather than turned into mosaic, the background stays dark and relatively simple, and the face is softly modelled rather than flattened into ornament. What it already has is the slightly remote, iconic presence that would become his hallmark, and a dress treated as a surface of lace, light and colour—sometimes described as lilac or pale blue, which earned the picture the nickname Porträt in Lila.

The square format is part of the meaning. Klimt used the square freely for landscapes; for a seated woman it is rare, and here it answers the architecture. Hung high above the fire, the sitter does not chat with the viewer at eye level. She presides. That fusion of portrait, interior design and a tightly knit circle of clients is the cultural signature of Vienna 1900. The painting is not a ritual object, but it was a representative one: a modern altarpiece for a private hall.

Canvas, Scale, and the Studies Behind It

The finished work is oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm (55.1 × 55.1 in). Hoffmann’s hall and the planned place over the chimney dictated the proportions. The medium is conventional; the ambition sits in the scale and in the way the figure is locked into that geometric field.

From a Viennese Fireplace to a Museum in Halle

The painting remained in the Villa Henneberg during Hugo’s lifetime. He died in 1918. In the 1920s Marie sold the portrait to the Leipzig music publisher Max Kuhn (1874–1947). Kuhn installed it in a new house of his own in Gohlis, Leipzig. After Kuhn’s death in 1947 his sister-in-law lent the painting, in 1966, to the then Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg. The museum bought it outright in 1979. It has stayed in Halle ever since and is now part of the Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt – Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale), shown among the museum’s works of around 1900 and Secessionism.

From a fireplace on the Hohe Warte to a public collection in Saxony-Anhalt, the portrait kept its role as a witness to how painting, photography and architecture once lived under one roof.