young gustav klimt -- 4/10/2026

10 Apr 2026

young gustav klimt -- 4/10/2026

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection -- from Gustav Klimt by Tobias G. Natter. Gustav Klimt, the famed late-nineteenth century Austrian painter whose work helped define Art Nouveau, now brings record-breaking prices for his artwork:

“Gustav Klimt was six years old when his parents enrolled him at the local elementary school at 61 Lerchenfelderstrasse in Vienna's 7th district in 1868. The young Gustav Klimt displayed a pronounced talent for art even as a pupil, and his teacher suggested to his parents that they should send him to the Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Art newly opened in 1867. The fact that his father, Ernst (1834-1892), was an engraver undoubtedly helped foster Gustav's creative leanings. It is a sign of his parents' appreciation of natural talent that they paid for their sons to attend the School of Applied Arts rather than arranging for them to begin an apprenticeship right after elementary school. In October 1876 the fourteen-year-old Gustav passed the entrance examination to the School of Applied Arts--which involved copying an antique head--with cop marks. Sitting beside him during the same examination was Franz Marsch (1861-1942), who would become a close friend and colleague for many years. Soon thereafter, Gustav's younger brother Ernst Klimt (1864-1892) also successfully sat the entrance examination of the School of Applied Arts and thus completed the artist trio in 1878.

“In comparison to the traditional curriculum caught at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, established in 1692, the reaching system at the School of Applied Arts was progressive. The school had evolved out of the Imperial and Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, which had opened its doors in 1864. Just as the Austrian Museum was modeled on the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), founded in London in 1852, one year after the first Great Exhibition, so its School of Applied Arts oriented itself towards the English schools of design, the most modern educational institutes of the day for students wishing to train in the industrial arts. The founder of the two institutions in Vienna, Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817-1885), had inscribed the ‘elevation of taste’ as what we might call a mission statement into the statutes. Eitelberger, himself a professor at the University of Vienna, saw art and applied art as inextricably linked. For this reason, the three major disciplines of architecture, sculpture and painting remained the basis of the education delivered by the School of Applied Arts, ‘for industrial art consists of nothing other than the application of these three arts to the requirements of everyday life’. When it came to filling the professorial chairs, applicants were informed that consideration would be given to ‘artists who demonstrate thorough proficiency in the particular area of art for which they will have responsibility and at the same time a love of the applied arts as a whole; not artists, however, who are only disposed to work in the sphere of industrial art on an occasional and incidental basis’. Rudolf von Eitelberger wanted the School of Applied Arts to educate ‘skilled forces for the needs of the art industry’; it was to train designers and draughtsmen for factories and craftsmen and teachers for industrial, technical and vocational colleges and for other schools of drawing and design. The School of Applied Arts correspondingly offered a number of different courses, of which the painting and figural drawing classes were taught by Ferdinand Laufberger (1829-1881).

Photographic portrait from 1914

“The curriculum followed by Gustav and Ernst led to a qualification as a drawing teacher: two years in the preparatory class and exams in the third year. As a candidate for the teaching profession, Gustav Klimt had to draw plaster casts in the morning, attend lectures in the afternoon and take life classes at night. Our information about Klimt's training at the School of Applied Arts comes to us not only from the institution's own files, but also from the curriculum vitae written by Gustav Klimt himself and Franz Macsch's Autobiographical Sketches. For the first two years, he attended classes held by three professors: Karl Hrachowina (1845-1896), a practising etcher who joined the teaching staff in 1877 and taught free-hand drawing and historical styles of ornament; Ludwig Minnigerode (1847-1900), a pupil of Eduard von Engerch (1818-1.897) at the Vienna Academy and teacher of genre painting and portraiture at the School of Applied Arts from 1876 to 1900; and Michael Rieser (1828-1905), professor of history painting and portraiture from 1868 co 1880. In the case of Franz Matsch, Gustav Klimt and Ernst Klimt, the new teaching methods soon produced results: busy on stained glass designs for the recently completed Votive Church by Heinrich von Ferscel (1828- 1883), Rieser gave his best preparatory-class students, Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch, the job of enlarging his sketches for some of the windows, as we know from Macsch's writings. The two students were paid for their work, which probably represented their first joint commission. At the start of his career as an artist, Klimt also made a little money by painting chiefly naturalistic portraits, often based on photographs. In her writings, his sister Hermine recollected char, ‘in his spare time at home, [Gustav] painted portraits from photographs. He did this work to the complete satisfaction of his customers. He was paid 5 gulden apiece’.

“In his third year at the School of Applied Arts, when Klimt had already passed the first round of exams and was studying under Michael Rieser for the State examination that would allow him to qualify as a drawing teacher, Rudolf von Eitelberger paid a visit to the school studio. Rieser took the occasion to draw Eichelberger's attention to the work of his gifted senior students Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Marsch. According to Matsch, Eitelberger exclaimed: ‘Drawing- teachers? [ ... ] You must become painters!’. Eitelberger decided to award scholarships of twenty gulden a month to all three and invited them to join the painting and decorative-art class for a further two years of study. ‘The “Brothers Klimt and Matsch Company” was financed’, as Franz Matsch wrote in his memoirs. Eitelberger recognized the young artists' talent at a point in time when, with Vienna's Ringstrasse in the grip of a construction boom, graduates of the class for painting and decorative art were in enormous demand.”