The Sketchbook of Gustav Klimt in the Belvedere

In this little notebook, Klimt captured his spontaneous ideas for motifs and pictures. According to contemporary reports, the master artist used several of these sketchbooks. The one Sonja Knips had in her possession is one of the few that survived.


The sketchbook, bound by a red leather cover, has 146 pages. It contains sketches for Klimt's known works, but also shows studies for works the master artist never created.

It mostly includes studies for the faculty painting "Philosophy." Klimt had been intensively focused on its composition since 1897. The finished work, completed in 1907, is a painting over 13 feet long and 10 feet wide.

The painting "Philosophy" was part of a commission for the Austrian Ministry of Education to decorate the ceiling of the University of Vienna's festival hall with representations of the scientific faculties. Klimt completed two more paintings for this commission, namely "Medicine" and "Jurisprudence."

In the composition sketches in the sketchbook, the motifs of the faculty painting "Philosophy" are already clearly recognizable. A powerful sphinx can be seen on the right, and on the left, a group of anonymous naked human figures.

Klimt provided the first drafts for the faculty paintings as early as 1898. These were examined by the Ministry of Education. This sketch could be a draft for "Jurisprudence," which still showed a personification of justice with a big sword at this time.

The sketchbook also contains sketches of Klimt's painting "Nuda Veritas" from 1899. The representation of naked truth has a symbolic and programmatic character and is finished with a well-known quote by Friedrich Schiller.

This sketch is marked with the words: "Frau Wahrheit will niemand erkennen" (No one wants to recognize Lady Truth), and presents a draft for the drawing "Tragedy," which Klimt designed for the portfolio "Allegories, New Series." Klimt created a total of 11 drafts for the publication, released in 1897 by Martin Gerlach.

One of the pages in the sketchbook shows a study for Klimt's famous painting "Judith I." This shows that Klimt had been using the book until at least 1900 or even 1901, as the painting "Judith I" was completed in 1901.

Several studies in the sketchbook are devoted to the design of the frame for Klimt's painting "Judith I." This proves that Gustav Klimt himself designed the frame for this picture. To complete it, Gustav commissioned his brother Georg who specialized in metalwork.

Klimt was occupied with some motifs for a long time. In 1898, the first sketches for the painting "Will-o'-the-Wisp" emerged, which was only finished in 1903. This sheet also includes a sketch for this painting, with its central motif of moving female nudes.

It is difficult to assign some sketches to a specific work. One drawing, for example, has female figures gliding into the water and is likely a study for Klimt's drawing "Fish Blood," which he created in 1898 for the magazine "Ver Sacrum".

Some pages in the sketchbook do not refer to any specific work by Klimt. For example, the relatively detailed drawing of an elegant lady with a large hat sitting at a table in a garden has no painted version in the master artist's oeuvre.

One of the sketches shows a lady sitting in an armchair looking toward the ground. It may be a study for the portrait of Sonja Knips. However, it is unlikely that Klimt would have portrayed her in this unrepresentative pose.

In another study from the sketchbook, Klimt has captured a sitting lady in elegant clothing and a hat in profile. It is probably a quickly composed study Klimt created in a coffee house or similar.

One particularly original motif, which can also be found in the sketchbook, involves the depiction of a resting cow or a bull. In fact, Klimt often painted cattle over these years during his summer stays in the country.

The sketchbook also includes one of Klimt's rare landscape studies. A group of treetops is depicted using coarse hatching; at the bottom of the page are hints of tree trunks and other shrubs. Klimt painted similar motifs in 1898 on the Hallstättersee and from 1900 on the Attersee.