Mother with Two Children (Family)

This painting is surprising considering the other works Gustav Klimt painted during these years. On the one hand, very little is known about the identity of the subjects. The master artist may have been portraying his impressions of his own liaisons with models and the children he fathered in this very private and intimate scene of a sleeping young mother with her two children who are also asleep. When this painting came out, both sons that he had with his models Maria Ucicka and Marie Zimmermann were ten years old.
On the other hand, this painting stands out through its strictly limited color palette. Dark, brownish-black colors are spread across the full canvas from which three faces emerge like islands of color. The clear differentiation between the brightly modelled skin and the homogeneously dark colors of most of the rest of the painting creates a stark contrast between the protruding three-dimensional sections and the two-dimensional parts. However, Klimt had already worked with such formal contrasts in the portraits of women he recently produced, including "Fritza Riedler" and "Adele Bloch-Bauer I." But in these portraits, the flat sections are filled with rich ornamentation and even layers of gold. Nevertheless, the dark background is not completely empty. The rectangular field behind the mother with different colors to the background is most likely a window. And the apparent piece of furniture on the left side of the painting is likely a cupboard with glass panels.