Water Serpents I (Wasserschlangen I), also called Girlfriends or Freundinnen I, is one of Gustav Klimt’s most intimate works from his Golden Phase. On a tall, narrow sheet of parchment, two nude women drift in a close embrace, their pale bodies dissolving into gold, algae, tentacles, and ornament. A fish stares out from the lower right corner. The scene feels less like a story than a dream: part mermaid myth, part underwater still life, part study of touch and stillness. Despite its modest size—only 50 × 20 cm (19.7 × 7.9 in)—the painting concentrates Klimt’s language of sensuality, pattern, and mystery into a single, jewel-like surface.
Made in Vienna, Finished in Gold
Klimt began the composition around 1904 and added small changes in 1907. Those years sit at the height of his Golden Phase, after visits to Ravenna and Venice in 1903, where Byzantine mosaics showed him how gold, flattening, and ornament could turn a picture into something almost sacred—or at least precious. He was already a central figure of the Vienna Secession, the group that rejected academic historicism in favor of modern decorative art. Female figures in water had occupied him for years: Moving Water (1898), Goldfish (1901–02), and the larger companion painting Water Serpents II belong to the same family. In these works water is not scenery. It stands for flux, the unconscious, and erotic life that cannot be shown too directly in bourgeois Vienna.
The painting first appeared in 1907 at Galerie Miethke in Vienna, then at the Kunstschau Wien of 1908—the same exhibition that introduced The Kiss to the public—and again in 1911 in the Austrian pavilion at the International Art Exhibition in Rome.
A Miniature That Sold Like a Masterpiece
Galerie Miethke offered the work in 1907 for 5,000 gulden. Industrialist Karl Wittgenstein—steel magnate, collector, and father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—bought it for a price comparable to one of Klimt’s large society portraits. That fact still surprises people: a sheet of parchment smaller than a poster commanded the money of a full-scale oil. Wittgenstein’s daughter Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein had sat for Klimt in 1905, so the purchase also belonged to a personal network of patronage.
Klimt produced many preparatory drawings of paired nudes before settling on this pose. The composition was largely ready by 1904; he kept adjusting details for years. Online images often crop the rounded top of the parchment, so the original looks even more like a precious object than most reproductions suggest. Because parchment warps, the work had to be restored in 1973 by Otto Wächter. Conservation still limits how often it can hang.
Later viewers have read the embrace as lesbian intimacy. In Klimt’s own time the picture was received mainly as Symbolist fantasy and deluxe decoration. The mythic title—“water serpents,” mermaids, hybrid beings—gave him cover. A frank portrait of two women touching this way would have been harder to exhibit. That gap between official title and what the bodies are doing is one of the painting’s lasting tensions.
Ornament as a Language of Desire
Water Serpents I sits at the crossing of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and Japonism. Klimt used the old European tradition of nymphs and sirens, but he also drew on Japanese prints (some scholars see an echo of Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife in the sucking, winding tentacles), Byzantine gold, and the sinuous “world arabesque” of nature popularized by Ernst Haeckel’s scientific illustrations.
The two women are not portraits. They are types: elongated, self-absorbed, half human and half pattern. Closed eyes and a slightly open mouth have been read as pleasure rather than sleep. The extended little finger on the companion’s shoulder is a small, telling gesture. Below the waist the bodies melt into scales, gold leaf, and plant forms. The staring fish both locates the scene underwater and returns the viewer’s gaze, turning looking itself into part of the subject. In this sense the painting is ritualistic without belonging to a church. Gold, like mosaic tesserae, lifts the figures out of ordinary time. Water becomes a liminal space—between waking and dream, nature and culture, permitted myth and forbidden intimacy. The work also belongs to a wider fin-de-siècle fascination with evolution, hybrid bodies, and the sea as a primordial erotic zone.
Parchment, Metals, and a Format Like a Relic
This is not an oil on canvas. Klimt worked on parchment with pencil underdrawing, watercolor, and gouache, then added gold, silver, platinum, and brass. The Belvedere describes the medium as “watercolour, gouache, pencil, gold, silver, platinum and brass on parchment.” The tall vertical format forces the eye to travel upward through hair, arms, gold plants, and spiraling tentacles. Metallic highlights catch light the way mosaic gold does. Klimt also designed a dark frame with embossed silver mounts for the piece, treating the whole object—not only the image—as a crafted work.
From a Dealer’s Wall to the Belvedere Vaults
First owner after the studio was Galerie Miethke, which both exhibited and offered the work for sale in 1907. Karl Wittgenstein acquired it soon afterward. It later passed through Galerie Neumann (L. T. Neumann). In 1950 the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere purchased it; it appeared in the museum’s 1959 exhibition of new acquisitions and has remained in the collection ever since.
Because parchment is fragile, it is frequently off view; scholars and visitors rely on the museum’s photographs. When conservation allows, the two Water Serpents paintings have been shown together—small parchment next to large canvas—so the shared theme and the difference in ambition are visible at a glance.
