Known as the "painter of women", Gustave Klimt was the son of a Viennese jeweler. At the age of fourteen he began studies at the School of Plastic Art in Vienna. By the age of eighteen, he, his brother, Ernest, and Franz Matsch undertook commissions for decorative walls, stage curtains, and ceiling paintings.

In 1893, Klimt began working on his own. By 1897 he became the first President of the Vienna Secession, a movement of nineteen Vienna artists who objected to the prevailing conservatism of the Vienna Künstlerhaus with its traditional orientation toward Historicism and resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists. Today, this movement is generally covered under the term of Art Nouveau. In 1912 he withdrew from the group and became President of the Austrian National Union of Artists.

In his early works, Klimt was highly influenced the Austrian painter Hans Makart but soon turned away from him after discovering Byzantine mosaics on a trip to Vienna. By the turn of the century, he developed his own distinctive neo-impressionist style.

From the beginning, Gustave Klimt caused uproars. While his techniques were classical in nature, many of his paintings were removed from shows and Nazis even burned some of them because his subject matter was considered scandalous. Naked young ladies mingling with skeletons, pregnant women, couples, both heterosexual and lesbianism, all exuded sexuality and in 1900 this was unacceptable material.

With his all-pervasive ornamentation, Klimt, witnessed the decadence of a society, creating a new type of picture, with women, life, and death as central themes. His works range from historicizing, to allegoric, mythological, erotic and classic.

Gustave Klimt was considered an Art Nouveau painter, a Symbolist, and later an abstract and expressionist. The truth is, there isn't a category for Klimt. He was a unique, successful painter with a style that still amazes today.