Seated Male Nude (private collection): an academic life study from Klimt's student years at the Kunstgewerbeschule — the disciplined drawing from the model that was the foundation of his craft, before any of the later manner.

Girl's Head Turned Left (Tokyo Fuji Art Museum): an early head study of the student years, in the careful naturalistic manner of Klimt's academic training; a specimen of the craft from which the golden style would depart.

Fable (Wien Museum): an early allegorical picture of the student and early-career years — a reclining woman with animals, in the historicist manner — one of the works by which the young Klimt made his name as a decorator.

Head Study of a Girl (Leopold Museum): an early naturalistic head study, of the academic years; a document of Klimt's training before the Secession transformation.

Male Nude (Belvedere): an academic life study of the student years — a rare male nude in an œuvre that would become overwhelmingly an art of the female body.

Design for a Curtain of the Karlsbad Stadttheater (Belvedere): a design from the Künstler-Compagnie's theatre-decoration years, when Klimt, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch decorated the new provincial theatres in the historicist manner; the early commercial craft.

Allegory of Sacred Music (Belvedere): an early allegorical figure — a woman with a lyre — in the historicist manner of the theatre and museum decorations; a forerunner of the later Music pictures and of Klimt's lifelong personification of the arts.

The Theatre at Taormina (private/Burgtheater): one of the ceiling paintings of the new Burgtheater staircase, decorated by the Künstler-Compagnie in 1886–88 in a sumptuous historicist manner — an ancient theatre scene, part of the commission that won Klimt the Emperor's favour.

Gouache on paper, Vienna Museum (Wien Museum). A meticulous view of the interior of the old Burgtheater, packed with the audience of Viennese society, painted by Klimt in 1888 shortly before the old theatre was demolished — a commission from the city to record the historic auditorium. Klimt painted the auditorium and its crowd (Matsch painted the companion view) with a topographical precision and, in the faces of the audience, some two hundred tiny portraits of recognisable members of Viennese society, so that the picture is both an architectural record and a group portrait of a city's elite. It won Klimt the Emperor's Prize in 1890 and was one of the achievements of his successful early career. It is a world away from the golden style — precise, illusionistic, documentary — and it shows the range of the craftsman before the revolution.

The commission was a civic one: the old Burgtheater, the beloved court theatre on the Michaelerplatz, was to be demolished and replaced, and the city commissioned Klimt and Matsch to record its two auditoriums before they were lost. Klimt's view — taken from the stage, looking out at the packed house — is a feat of perspective and of portraiture: the tiers of boxes and seats recede with topographical accuracy, and the audience is a crowd of some hundred and fifty individual likenesses, recognisable members of Viennese society, from the aristocracy to the artistic world, each a tiny finished portrait.

The picture won Klimt the Emperor's Prize in 1890 and was one of the triumphs of his early career — proof of a virtuosity in illusionistic, documentary painting that his later manner would entirely renounce. It is, with the KHM spandrels, the fullest record of the academic Klimt, and it is also a precious historical document: a group portrait of a city's elite, gathered in a theatre that no longer exists, painted by the man who would become the scandal of that same society a decade later. The Wien Museum, which holds it, treasures it as both an artwork and a record of vanished Vienna.

Klimt's technique here is miniaturist and illusionistic — the very opposite of the flat golden manner — and it is worth dwelling on as evidence of the range he commanded and then renounced. Each of the tiny audience faces is a finished likeness; the perspective of the tiered auditorium is exact; the light and the space are convincingly rendered. This is the academic virtuoso, the master of illusion and of the documentary record, and the deliberate abandonment of all these skills for the flat, anti-illusionistic surface of the Secession years is the measure of how completely Klimt's idea of what a picture should be was transformed. The Burgtheater interior is the high point of the manner he left behind.

What to look at

The tiered auditorium in exact perspective; the packed house of society; the hundred and fifty tiny individual portraits in the crowd; the illusionistic virtuosity. Then remember it records a theatre that no longer exists, and a manner Klimt would renounce.

Allegory of Sculpture (MAK – Museum of Applied Arts): a drawing/allegory of the art of sculpture, one of Klimt's personifications of the arts made for the applied-arts world in the historicist manner of his early career.

Sappho (Wien Museum): an early half-length of the poet Sappho, in the historicist-classical manner; one of Klimt's early ideal female heads, a forerunner of the femmes fatales and muses to come.

Portrait of the Pianist Joseph Pembauer (Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck): an early portrait of a musician, in an ornamented frame Klimt designed, with a classical vignette — a transitional work in which the decorative framing begins to matter, on the edge of the Secession manner.

Two Girls with an Oleander (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford): two young women in classical dress with a flowering oleander, in the graceful historicist manner of the early 1890s; one of Klimt's early ideal-female groups, in an American collection.

A fourth of the Kunsthistorisches Museum staircase decorations (1890–91): allegorical figures of the art of ancient Greece and Egypt — a robed Greek woman and, notably, an Egyptian figure whose frontal, hieratic pose already hints at the flat, decorative manner Klimt would develop. Of all the KHM spandrels this is the one in which the future Klimt is most nearly visible: the Egyptian figure's flatness and ornament anticipate, faintly, the golden style's debt to Egyptian and Byzantine art. It belongs to the academic apprenticeship, but it carries the seed of the transformation. Wikidata's 1850 date is a placeholder.

The Egyptian figure in this spandrel is the most prophetic thing in Klimt's academic work. Where the Greek allegory is a conventional classical woman, the Egyptian is frontal, flat, hieratic, her pose and ornament drawn from the ancient art itself — and this flatness, this reduction of the figure to a decorative frontal plane, is exactly what Klimt would return to in the golden style, whose debts to Egyptian and Byzantine art are fundamental. The eye motifs, the frontality, the flat gold that would fill Adele and The Kiss have a distant ancestor here, in the young decorator's dutiful personification of ancient Egypt.

This makes the spandrel more than a period piece: it is the point where Klimt's academic training and his future style touch, the moment when the flat, ornamental, gold-ground manner of the ancient art he was copying planted a seed that would flower, fifteen years later, into the golden phase. The Kunsthistorisches Museum staircase, where these figures still are, is thus not only the record of Klimt's beginning but, in the Egyptian figure, a faint prophecy of his summit.

Klimt's lifelong magpie method of gathering ornament from every tradition — Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, Mycenaean, Japanese, folk — begins, in a sense, with commissions like this, where the young decorator had to study and reproduce the styles of the past epoch by epoch. The discipline of personifying ancient Egypt required him to look hard at Egyptian art, and the flat frontal hieratic manner he absorbed there resurfaced, transformed, in the golden style. The KHM spandrels are thus not merely the academic 'before' but a school of ornament whose lessons the mature Klimt would draw on; the eye motifs and the flat gold of the golden phase have one of their roots in this dutiful staircase allegory of 1890–91.

What to look at

The Greek and the Egyptian figures; above all the Egyptian's flat, frontal, hieratic pose and ornament — the faint prophecy of the golden style. Then the seed of the future in the academic present.

Of all the young Klimt's academic work, this is the picture in which hindsight finds the most — the Egyptian figure a distant ancestor of the golden icons — and it remains in place on the museum staircase, a prophecy hidden in a commission. The spandrel is thus doubly valuable — the academic beginning and the faint prophecy of the golden end, in one commissioned allegory of 1890–91. It is one of the four epochs the young painter personified on the great staircase, and the one in which the mature Klimt is most nearly foretold.

A third of the Kunsthistorisches Museum staircase spandrels (1890–91): a female personification of Florentine art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, robed and set in a niche, in the sumptuous historicist style. One of the group of allegories by which the young Klimt and his partners decorated the new museum's grand stair; these figures, elegant and academic, are the fullest surviving examples of Klimt's early manner before the crisis of the later 1890s transformed his art. Wikidata's 1850 date is a placeholder; the pictures are of 1890–91, and they are best seen as the accomplished, conventional starting-point from which the whole later revolution departed.

Of the four epochs Klimt personified on the KHM staircase, the Florentine Renaissance was the natural centre of the museum's Italian holdings, and the figure is among the more sumptuous — a robed woman in the manner the collections themselves display, an allegory that mirrors the art it introduces. The whole programme was a kind of visual table of contents for the museum, and Klimt's contribution to it was the most accomplished, which is why the imperial favour and the prizes followed.

What these pictures cannot do is predict the future: nothing in the decorous Florence allegory announces the painter of the University scandal and the golden femme fatale. That is their fascination. They are the fullest surviving group of Klimt's academic work, the record of the successful official career he threw over, and the ground against which the whole later revolution is measured. The transformation that produced the Secession Klimt out of this decorator is one of the abrupt reinventions in the history of modern art, and it began, in part, in the very craft — the love of the decorative surface, the gold, the ornament — that these staircase figures already display, turned from the service of the past to the service of the new.

The historicist manner of these figures — sumptuous, illusionistic, correct — was Hans Makart's, the reigning style of Ringstrasse Vienna, and Klimt was its most gifted young practitioner; the death of Makart in 1884 had left the field open, and the Künstler-Compagnie stepped into it. That the same hand and the same love of the decorative surface would, within a decade, produce the flat gold of Judith is the fascination of these pictures: the continuity is the ornament, the gold, the sensuality; the break is the abandonment of illusionism and historicism for flatness and symbol. The Florence allegory is a specimen of the continuity's starting-point, decorous and accomplished, awaiting the transformation.

What to look at

The robed figure of Florentine art; the sumptuous colour and ornament; the illusionistic niche. Then the continuity — the love of the decorative surface — that links this decorous allegory to the golden Judith a decade later.

Seen at close range from the museum's viewing platform, the Florence allegory reveals the fineness of Klimt's early drawing and the sensuality already latent in his female figures — the future master hidden inside the accomplished decorator. The picture is a document of the imperial, historicist Vienna that Klimt would soon set himself against, and of the accomplished young decorator he was before he did. Klimt shared the KHM commission with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, and the individual hands are not always distinguishable; the programme was a collective work of the Künstler-Compagnie at the height of its official success.

One of the decorative paintings the young Klimt, with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, made for the spandrels and intercolumniations of the grand staircase of the new Kunsthistorisches Museum (1890–91) — allegorical female figures personifying the historic styles the museum's collections represent. Old Italian Art is a robed woman in a niche, in the sumptuous historicist manner of Makart that Klimt then practised; the work won him the Emperor's favour and belongs to the successful academic career he would abandon a few years later. Wikidata's 1850 date is a placeholder. Seen now, these spandrels are the 'before' against which the Secession revolution measures itself: the same hand that painted this decorous allegory would, within a decade, paint Judith.

The spandrel figures are the fullest surviving witness to Klimt's academic phase — the seven years of the Künstler-Compagnie's decorative commissions that made his early reputation and won him the imperial prizes. Working from a scaffold in the museum's staircase, Klimt and his partners filled the awkward triangular spandrels and the narrow spaces between the columns with allegorical women embodying the epochs whose art the collections below display; the figures are elegant, correct, richly coloured, and entirely within the historicist convention of Makart's Vienna. What distinguishes Klimt's contribution, seen with hindsight, is the quality of the drawing and a certain intensity in the faces — the future master visible only in the craft, not yet in the conception.

The distance between these decorous allegories and the Judith of a decade later is the measure of the transformation the 1890s worked in Klimt: the death of his brother Ernst in 1892, the years of silence, and the emergence around 1897–98 of a wholly changed painter. To stand in the Kunsthistorisches Museum staircase and look up at these spandrels is to see where he began — the accomplished, conventional, imperially favoured decorator — and to measure how far, and how fast, he travelled from it.

The KHM staircase programme was shared among Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst, and Franz Matsch, and the individual attributions are not always certain; the intercolumnia and spandrels were divided by subject, and the styles are close, the young collaborators working to a common historicist standard. What can be said is that the finest of the figures — and this is among them — show a sensitivity of drawing and a subtle eroticism in the female form that mark the future Klimt. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has, in recent years, made these high, hard-to-see decorations accessible by a special viewing bridge erected in the staircase, so that visitors can at last look Klimt's academic allegories in the face — and measure, at close range, the craft from which the revolution came.

What to look at

The robed allegorical figure; the niche and the historicist ornament; the sumptuous Makartian colour; the quality of the drawing beneath the convention. Then look up, in the museum's staircase, and find the future Klimt in the craft.

The spandrels remain in situ in the museum for which they were made, a rare survival of Klimt's monumental decoration in its original place — and, since so much of his later monumental work was destroyed, an unusually complete witness to at least the beginning of his career as a decorator.

Another of the Kunsthistorisches Museum staircase decorations of 1890–91: an allegorical figure personifying the art of the fifteenth century in Rome and Venice, in the historicist manner. Painted by Gustav Klimt as part of the Künstler-Compagnie's commission to fill the spandrels and intercolumnia between the columns of the great stair with figures embodying the epochs of art the museum houses. It is a document of Klimt's academic apprenticeship and of the Ringstrasse decorative economy in which he made his early name; the elegance and the historicism are Makart's, the future Secessionist not yet visible except in the quality of the drawing. Wikidata's 1850 date is a placeholder.

The staircase decorations were a prestige commission — the new Kunsthistorisches Museum was one of the great buildings of the Ringstrasse, the display-case of the imperial collections — and to be entrusted with its allegorical programme was a mark of the young Klimt's standing in the official art world of the late 1880s. The figures personifying the epochs of art (Egyptian, Greek, the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento, and the rest) were divided among the members of the Künstler-Compagnie, and Klimt's are distinguished by their grace and their subtle sensuality.

This figure of the Quattrocento in Rome and Venice belongs to that programme, and it is a specimen of the manner Klimt would abandon: illusionistic, historicist, decorous, the female figure idealised in the academic mode. Its interest now is entirely as a starting-point — the 'before' of a career whose 'after' would scandalise the same city that had prized these elegant allegories. The pictures are high on the museum's staircase, hard to see; they reward the visitor who looks up with the surprise of a familiar name in an unfamiliar manner.

The programme as a whole was an allegory of the museum's purpose: the epochs of art personified, presiding over the collections that embody them, so that the building announces its own contents in painted figures. Klimt's part in it was recognised as outstanding, and the imperial prizes and the Golden Order of Merit followed; he was, at the turn of the 1890s, one of the most promising decorators in the empire, on a path that pointed toward a professorship and official honours. The path ended in the crisis of the mid-1890s and the revolt of 1897, and these spandrels became, in retrospect, the record of the road not taken — the successful, honoured, academic career that the Secession Klimt threw over for scandal and freedom.

What to look at

The elegant personification in her niche; the historicist manner; the subtle sensuality of the figure. Then the whole staircase programme, an allegory of the museum's own collections, and the successful career it announced and Klimt abandoned.

The figure remains in place on the museum staircase, one of a cycle by which the building declares its own contents, and one of the fullest surviving examples of the academic manner from which the whole later revolution departed. The staircase decorations, high above the visitor, are among the least-seen works in Klimt's œuvre and among the most revealing of where it began.

Portrait of Mathilde Trau (Belvedere): an early portrait of a young woman in the naturalistic manner, before the Secession; one of the society portraits with which Klimt was establishing himself.

Portrait of a Woman (Belvedere): another early female portrait of the mid-1890s, naturalistic, of the years just before the Secession revolution.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Wien Museum): an early female portrait of the mid-1890s, in the transitional manner between the academic and the emerging symbolist styles.

Seated Young Girl (Leopold Museum): a study of a seated girl, of the mid-1890s; one of the transitional works before Klimt's style changed.

Josef Lewinsky as Carlos in 'Clavigo' (Belvedere): a portrait of the Burgtheater actor Josef Lewinsky in the role of Carlos, framed in an allegorical ornamental border — a theatrical portrait of the transitional years, image and ornament combined.

Lady with a Lilac Scarf (Portrait of a Lady) (Kunsthistorisches Museum): a female portrait of the mid-1890s, in the naturalistic manner shading toward the decorative; one of the transitional society portraits.

Love (Liebe) (Wien Museum): an early symbolist picture of a couple embracing, framed with roses and, above, small faces of the ages of life watching — a forerunner of the great love-and-mortality theme of The Kiss and Death and Life, in the emerging Jugendstil manner.

Music I (Neue Pinakothek, Munich): a woman playing a lyre before a sphinx and a mask, an allegory of music in the emerging symbolist manner — one of Klimt's personifications of the arts, a forerunner of the Schubert and Music II.

Blind Man (Der Blinde) (Leopold Museum): a study of a blind man, a rare genre subject of the mid-1890s, painted with a naturalistic sympathy; one of the works in which Klimt looked beyond his usual society subjects.

Lady by the Fireplace (Belvedere): a portrait of a woman seated by a fire, of the early Secession years, in a soft, atmospheric, transitional manner.

Black chalk, pencil, wash and gold on paper, Vienna Museum. A drawing — an allegorical figure of Tragedy, a woman holding a mask, framed in an ornamental border with theatrical motifs — made in 1897 as one of a series of allegories for the publication Allegorien. It belongs to the transitional years, at the founding of the Secession, when Klimt was moving from the historicist manner toward the flat, symbolist, ornamental style; the framing border and the stylised figure show the Jugendstil manner emerging. It is a document of the moment of change, the academic decorator becoming the Secessionist, and of Klimt's continuing work as a designer of decorative and graphic allegory alongside his paintings.

Tragedy was made for Allegorien und Embleme, a publisher's compendium of allegorical designs for which many artists supplied models, and it shows Klimt working, as he did throughout, as a designer of graphic and decorative allegory alongside his painting. The figure of Tragedy, holding the theatrical mask, is framed in an elaborate ornamental border with masks and stylised motifs, and the whole is drawn with the flat, linear, decorative manner of the emerging Jugendstil — the historicist illusionism of the Burgtheater picture giving way to the flat symbolism of the Secession.

The drawing belongs to the pivotal years around 1897, when Klimt founded the Secession and remade his art, and it is a document of the transition in a minor key: the same allegorical subject-matter as the academic work, but treated in the new flat, ornamental, symbolist style. The Wien Museum's sheet is one of the works that let one watch the change happen — the decorator becoming the modernist, the illusionistic space collapsing into the decorative plane, the border and the ornament becoming as important as the figure. It is a small hinge in a large transformation.

Klimt's work as a designer of graphic and decorative allegory — for the Allegorien portfolios, for Ver Sacrum, for the Secession's posters and publications — ran alongside his painting throughout, and it is where much of the flat, linear, ornamental Jugendstil manner was worked out. Tragedy, with its masks and its ornamental border, is a characteristic example, and it belongs to the same moment as the founding of the Secession and the remaking of Klimt's painted style. The border is as important as the figure — the decorative frame becoming part of the work — and this integration of image and ornament, of figure and frame, is one of the Jugendstil's and Klimt's central principles, carried from the graphic work into the great paintings.

What to look at

The figure of Tragedy with her mask; the ornamental border with its theatrical motifs; the flat, linear Jugendstil manner. Then the border as part of the work — image and ornament made one, the principle of the mature style.

The sheet belongs to the Wien Museum's rich holdings of Klimt's graphic and preparatory work, and it is one of the small hinges on which the transformation of his art can be watched, the academic allegory turning into the Jugendstil design.

After the Rain (Chickens in a Garden) (Belvedere): an early landscape with white chickens on a wet garden path among green — a rare Klimt landscape with animals, of the first Attersee years, in a fresh naturalistic manner before the full flattening.

Head of a Girl en face (private collection): a study of a girl's head, frontal, of the early Secession years.

Oil on canvas. An early symbolist picture of naked female figures floating and drifting in dark water — one of the first of Klimt's images of women as water-creatures, nixies and sirens, that would culminate in the Water Serpents. The dark, flowing, dreamlike treatment, the female nudes dissolved into the movement of the water, belong to the Secession-era symbolism, under the influence of the international Jugendstil and of Symbolists like Toorop and Khnopff. It is an early statement of one of Klimt's enduring themes: the woman as an aquatic, drifting, sensual being, the female body fused with the element of water.

Moving Water is one of the earliest of Klimt's aquatic pictures — the images of naked women drifting, floating, half-dissolved in dark water that recur through his work, from this to the Silverfish and the Water Serpents. The subject drew on the Jugendstil and Symbolist fascination with the nixie, the siren, the water-nymph — the woman as an aquatic, sensual, dangerous being — and on the international current of Symbolist painting (Böcklin, Toorop, Khnopff) that the Secession's exhibitions brought to Vienna.

The treatment is dark, flowing and dreamlike: the female nudes are not set in the water but dissolved into its movement, their bodies and hair merging with the current, the whole a fluid, tenebrous field. It is an early statement of one of Klimt's enduring themes — the female body fused with the element of water, sexuality rendered as drift and flow — and it belongs with the erotic and the symbolist strands of the œuvre rather than the portraits. The aquatic pictures are among the frankest of Klimt's celebrations of the female body, and Moving Water is where the theme begins.

The aquatic pictures form one of the most coherent strands of Klimt's art, running from Moving Water at the turn of the century through the Silverfish and the Goldfish to the two Water Serpents — a sustained meditation on the woman as a water-creature, the female body dissolved into the flow and drift of the element. The subject let Klimt paint the nude with a freedom the portrait and the allegory did not allow, and it connects to the thousands of erotic drawings that are the foundation of his art of the body. Moving Water is the early, dark, symbolist statement of the theme; the later versions would add gold and colour, but the core — sexuality rendered as aquatic drift — is already here.

What to look at

The naked women dissolved into the dark, flowing water; the streaming hair; the dreamlike, tenebrous field. Then the theme it begins — the woman as water-creature — that runs to the Water Serpents.

The picture belongs to the dark, symbolist beginning of Klimt's long engagement with the female body and the element of water, a theme he would carry, through gold and colour, to the end of his career. As one of the earliest of the water-pictures, it holds a particular place in the development of Klimt's art of the female body. The dark, drifting nudes look back to Böcklin and the Symbolists and forward to the Water Serpents, and the picture is a characteristic product of the Secession's engagement with international symbolism. It is among the earliest of the aquatic pictures, and one of the darkest and most purely symbolist of them.

Oil on canvas, 75 × 75 cm — Wien Museum, Vienna. A square panel: the goddess Athena, in golden armour and helmet, seen close and frontal, holds a small figure of Nuda Veritas (naked truth) in her hand, a red-haired Gorgon on her breastplate sticking out its tongue; the ground and armour are gold. One of the first of Klimt's pictures to use gold extensively, and an emblem of the Secession, of which Athena — goddess of wisdom and the arts, patron of just war — was the chosen protectress. The picture is a declaration of the Secession's militancy: Athena armed for the battle of the new art against the old, holding truth in her hand, the Gorgon's tongue out at the enemy. It is the golden style in its first, armoured emergence, and a manifesto in a square.

Pallas Athena is the Secession's armoured goddess. Klimt painted the patroness of wisdom, the arts and just war in golden armour and helmet, seen close and frontal, her gaze level and challenging, holding in her hand a tiny figure of Nuda Veritas — naked truth — and wearing on her breastplate the head of the Gorgon Medusa, tongue out, an emblem of terror turned against the enemy. Athena was the Secession's chosen protectress, and the picture is a declaration of militancy: the goddess armed for the battle of the new art against the old academy, wisdom and truth on her side, the Gorgon's defiance on her breast.

It is one of the first pictures in which Klimt used gold extensively — the armour, the helmet, the ground — and so an early step toward the golden style, and it is one of the most combative images of the Secession years. The frontal, hieratic goddess, the gold, the emblematic apparatus look back to the ancient art Klimt studied and forward to the golden phase; and the little naked Truth in her hand ties the picture to Nuda Veritas of the following year. It is a manifesto in the form of a goddess, and it hangs in the Wien Museum as one of the icons of Viennese modernism's founding moment.

Pallas Athena is one of the earliest pictures in which Klimt's mature themes and means converge: the gold, the frontal hieratic figure, the emblematic apparatus, the fusion of the classical and the modern, the woman as at once wise, armed and dangerous. Athena's level, challenging gaze — she looks straight out at the viewer, unblinking — makes the picture a confrontation, fitting for the emblem of a movement at war with the establishment. The Gorgon on the breastplate, tongue out, is defiance itself. Painted in 1898, at the height of the Secession's founding energy, it is a bridge between the symbolist allegories of the 1890s and the golden style to come, and one of the icons of Viennese modernism's militant beginning.

What to look at

Athena's golden armour and level, challenging gaze; the little Nuda Veritas in her hand; the Gorgon with its tongue out on her breastplate; the gold ground. Then the militancy — the goddess armed for the battle of the new art.

Portrait of Helene Klimt (Kunstmuseum Bern): a portrait of the painter's young niece Helene, daughter of his late brother Ernst, of whom Klimt became guardian — a tender family portrait in near-profile, in a restrained, pale manner.

Oil on canvas, Belvedere, Vienna. An early portrait of a woman in the manner of the late 1890s, before the golden style — the sitter's face modelled with care, the treatment still relatively naturalistic, the flat decorative field not yet developed. It belongs to the group of portraits with which Klimt, in the Secession years, was establishing himself as the portraitist of Viennese society women, and it shows the manner in transition from the academic to the symbolist. The Belvedere, which holds it, has the greatest collection of Klimt, and this early portrait is part of the sequence that runs to the gold Adele and beyond.

The portrait belongs to the group of pictures with which Klimt, in the years around 1898, was becoming the portraitist of choice for the women of Vienna's cultivated, wealthy bourgeoisie — the sitters who would sustain him for the rest of his career. The manner is still transitional: the face is modelled with a naturalism inherited from the academic training, but the treatment is beginning to flatten, and the decorative field that would later swallow the figure is not yet developed.

These early portraits are the foundation of the great sequence that runs through Emilie Flöge, Fritza Riedler, the two Adele Bloch-Bauers and the late colour portraits — the collective portrait of a class through its women that is one of Klimt's central achievements. The Belvedere, which holds the greatest concentration of Klimt, keeps this early Portrait of a Woman as part of that sequence, the naturalistic starting-point from which the ornamental portrait would develop. It is a quiet picture, overshadowed by the golden portraits that followed, but it is where the portraitist of Vienna 1900 began to find his subject.

The pre-golden portraits are the least famous but, for the understanding of Klimt's development, among the most important: they show the naturalistic, tonal manner — inherited from the academic training and from Whistler and the international portrait tradition — out of which the ornamental portrait grew. In this Portrait of a Woman the face is still the picture's focus, modelled and particular; the flat decorative field that would later dominate is only beginning. Set beside the gold Adele of a decade later, it measures the distance the portrait travelled — from the modelled likeness in shallow space to the face floating in a field of gold — and it is a necessary part of the sequence the Belvedere's great Klimt collection preserves.

What to look at

The modelled, particular face; the shallow space; the decorative field only beginning. Then set it beside the gold Adele and measure the distance the portrait would travel.

The Belvedere's great Klimt collection preserves the whole arc of his portraiture, from naturalistic beginnings like this to the golden summit and the late colour, and this early Portrait of a Woman is a necessary part of that story. It is a quiet, transitional picture, easily overshadowed by the golden portraits, but essential to the story of how Klimt's portraiture came to be what it was. The Belvedere, holding the greatest concentration of Klimt anywhere, sets it in the long sequence of his portraits of women, the collective portrait of a class that is one of his central achievements. The picture belongs to the naturalistic beginning of a portraiture that would become, within a decade, the most ornamental in Europe.

A portrait — unusual in the œuvre — of a member of a group of Ga people from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) who were exhibited in a Völkerschau ('people show') in Vienna in 1896–97, one of the ethnographic exhibitions of the colonial era. Klimt painted several studies of the African visitors, and this head of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona is among the few portraits of a Black sitter in his work. It is a document of the colonial spectacle of the age and of Klimt's interest in the model beyond his usual Viennese circle; the picture has drawn renewed attention in the modern reckoning with the ethnographic exhibitions and their subjects, the named individuals behind the anonymous 'show'.

The Ga people from the Gold Coast were exhibited in Vienna in a Völkerschau — one of the 'ethnographic shows' that displayed colonised peoples for European audiences, a now-notorious feature of the colonial era — and Klimt, like other artists, drew and painted some of the participants. That he made a portrait of a named individual, Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, rather than an anonymous 'type', is notable, and the picture has drawn renewed attention as the modern reckoning with these shows has sought to recover the individuals behind them.

The portrait is a rarity in Klimt's œuvre — a Black sitter, a male sitter, a subject from outside his Viennese world — and it belongs to the Secession years, when his interest in the model was widening. As a work it is a straightforward, attentive head; as a document it is charged, a fragment of the colonial history that ran beneath the golden surface of Klimt's Vienna, and a reminder that the same city that staged the Völkerschau was the capital of the empire whose collapse Klimt's art would come to seem to foretell. The picture is now studied as much for what it records as for what it is.

Klimt made more than one study of the Ga visitors, and the portraits are attentive rather than caricatural — he painted the prince as an individual, with dignity, in a straightforward oil head — which distinguishes them from the dehumanising apparatus of the Völkerschau itself. The modern interest in the picture is part of the wider effort to recover the names, histories and humanity of the people displayed in these colonial shows, and Klimt's portrait, giving a name and a face, has become a small but significant document in that recovery. It also shows the breadth of Klimt's interest in the human head beyond his glamorous Viennese clientele — the same searching attention, turned on a sitter from the other side of the colonial world.

What to look at

The dignified, individual head of the prince; the attentive, uncaricatured treatment. Then the history it carries — the colonial Völkerschau, and the modern recovery of the named people displayed in it.

The picture has been included in recent exhibitions examining Vienna's colonial history and the ethnographic shows, where it serves as a rare instance of an individual portrait — a name and a face — rescued from the anonymity of the spectacle.

Sonja Knips (Belvedere): a portrait of the young Sonja Knips, seated in a great cloud of pale pink tulle, turning as if surprised, in a near-square format — one of the loveliest and most delicate of the early portraits, on the threshold of the golden manner, and one of the Belvedere's treasures.

A Morning by the Pond (Leopold Museum): an early Attersee landscape of a pond among trees, in a fresh, atmospheric manner shading toward the flattening of the later landscapes; one of the first of the great landscape series.

Oil on canvas, 252 × 56 cm — Austrian Theatre Museum, Vienna. A tall, narrow panel: a naked red-haired woman stands frontally, holding up a mirror to the viewer, a serpent at her feet, her body wreathed with flowers, above her an inscription from Schiller. 'Naked Truth' — the Nuda Veritas — holds the mirror to modern man, and the picture is Klimt's Secession-era manifesto of the artist's duty to truth against convention. The frontal nude, the mirror, the inscription, the ornamental framing are the Jugendstil symbolism at its most programmatic; the red hair and the frank nudity are the femme fatale and the truth-teller in one. It is one of the defining images of the Secession's ideal — art as the naked truth held up to a hypocritical society — and it caused, like everything Klimt showed, offence.

Nuda Veritas is the Secession's manifesto in a single figure. The naked, red-haired woman holding up the mirror to the viewer, the serpent at her feet, the flowers in her hair, is 'Naked Truth' — the truth the new art was pledged to show against the hypocrisy and historicism of the old — and above her Klimt inscribed a line from Schiller: 'If you cannot please everyone by your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.' The frontal nude, the mirror held out, the ornamental framing, the motto are the Jugendstil symbolism at its most programmatic, and the picture is a declaration of the artist's duty to truth over convention and over the crowd.

It caused, like everything Klimt showed in these years, offence — the frank red-haired nudity, the confrontational mirror, the disdain of the motto for the many — and it is one of the defining images of the Secession's ideal. The red-haired woman is at once the truth-teller and the femme fatale, the two fused as they would be in Judith two years later; and the mirror held out to the viewer makes the picture an accusation as much as an allegory. It hangs in the Theatre Museum in Vienna, a tall narrow panel of the Secession's founding faith.

The motto and the mirror make Nuda Veritas the most explicitly programmatic of Klimt's pictures — a statement of the Secession's, and the artist's, creed. The mirror held out to the viewer is truth turned back on the beholder, an accusation; the disdainful Schiller motto ('To please many is bad') is the artist's rejection of the crowd and the market in favour of the discerning few; the naked red-haired woman is truth unadorned, and also the femme fatale, the two fused. It is Klimt at his most combative and most idealistic, in the founding years of the Secession, and it caused the offence such frankness always did. The tall narrow format, the ornamental framing and the inscription unite the graphic and the painterly, the Jugendstil poster and the easel picture, in a single manifesto.

What to look at

The frontal red-haired nude; the mirror held out to the viewer; the serpent, the flowers, the Schiller motto above. Then the mirror as accusation — truth turned back on the beholder — and the Secession's creed made flesh.