Gustav Klimt:
Bust of a Smiling Girl (Brustbild eines lächelnden Mädchens von vorne, 1896)
Black chalk
44.8 × 31.7 cm
Private collection
(Strobl s274)

The drawing once belonged to Erich Lederer, son of August and Serena Lederer—Klimt’s most devoted patrons—and a close friend of Egon Schiele. It carries the GUSTAV KLIMT NACHLASS stamp, linking it directly to the artist’s estate. How it travelled from the Lederer family to its present private owner is not known.

What makes this sheet so quietly touching is the warmth of the encounter it preserves. Klimt rarely allowed overt emotion to surface in his early portrait studies; his sitters are usually inward, dreamy, or erotically charged. Here, however, the girl meets us with a smile that feels spontaneous and genuinely alive. Her head tilts slightly, her eyes brighten, and the expression seems to rise naturally rather than being arranged for the artist.

Klimt’s handling of black chalk is unusually tender. The contours are soft and breathing, the modelling light, and the hair—drawn in loose, buoyant strokes—frames the face with a kind of affectionate disorder. The shoulders are barely indicated, as if Klimt wanted nothing to distract from the immediacy of the smile.

Placed in the context of 1896, the drawing gains further resonance. Klimt was in the midst of shedding the last traces of his academic training, searching for a more personal, psychologically attuned line. This sheet feels like a private step in that direction: intimate, unguarded, and free of the symbolic charge that would soon enter his work. It captures a fleeting moment of human warmth before the stylization of the Secession years.

There is also a quiet poignancy in the survival of such a tender image through the turbulent history of the Lederer collection. That this small, smiling face has travelled across time and circumstance adds another layer of intimacy to the sheet—an echo of a moment that somehow endured.