Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 138 × 138 cm, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907 and four years in the making. It portrays Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of the Viennese industrialist and banker Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, and it is the great portrait of Klimt’s golden period. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 the Bloch-Bauers fled and the painting was confiscated; it stayed in the Belvedere until 2006, when a court ruling returned it to Maria Altmann, the surviving niece, who sold it for 135 million dollars.