Look closely at this famous embrace and you're not just looking at paint. Gustav Klimt worked real gold and silver leaf directly into the canvas, which is part of why the picture seems to glow from the inside.
What you're looking at
The Kiss shows a couple kneeling together on a bed of flowers, wrapped almost entirely in flat, ornately patterned robes — his covered in rectangles, hers in circles and swirls. Their faces and hands are the only realistic, three-dimensional parts of the whole picture; everything else flattens into pure decoration.
The Golden Phase
Klimt painted The Kiss in 1907-1908, during what's now called his "Golden Phase," a period when he leaned hard into gold leaf and flat, mosaic-like pattern, inspired partly by Byzantine gold mosaics he had seen on a trip to Ravenna, Italy. The Kiss is the best-known result of that period, and it's still one of the most reproduced paintings in the world.
Many people believe the couple represents Klimt himself with his lifelong companion Emilie Flöge, though the artist never confirmed the identities of either figure, and it remains a guess rather than a documented fact.
One detail to look for
Compare the two patterns closely. His robe is built from stiff black-and-white rectangles; hers is soft ovals and floral rounds in brighter colors. Klimt used pattern itself to separate male and female, without changing a single realistic body shape.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, held at the Belvedere in Vienna, so what you hang is honestly scaled rather than guessed at. Shop the canvas print.