Gustav Klimt:
Daphne (formerly Girl with Blue Veil) (Mädchen mit blauem Schleier), 1903
Oil on canvas
67 × 55 cm
Private collection
(Natter no. 149)

Every now and then, even after years of looking at Klimt, something resurfaces that feels almost miraculous. For decades, many of the leading Klimt scholars believed this painting had vanished. Its sudden reappearance in the great Klimt exhibition of 2001 at the National Gallery of Canada—quietly loaned from an anonymous private collection—felt like a small shock, the kind that reminds you how much of an artist’s story can still lie hidden in plain sight. Seeing the painting today, with its soft auburn profile set against a field of shimmering greens and scattered blossoms, you feel how Klimt folded myth into something intimate and human long before anyone realised this was his lost Daphne.

I want to give full and heartfelt credit for the historical reconstruction that follows to Marian Bisanz‑Prakken, Klimt specialist and retired curator of the Albertina in Vienna. Her scholarship brought clarity to a mystery that puzzled generations, and the warmth and precision of her voice deserve to be acknowledged. What follows is not her text, but a retelling shaped by her research and insights.

For a long time, “Daphne” was little more than a title in early exhibition catalogues. Klimt showed a painting under that name at the Vienna Secession between late 1903 and early 1904, yet no critic described it, no reproduction survived, and after a few further showings in Dresden and Berlin it slipped from view. The last documented trace came in 1905, when Galerie Miethke sold it to a member of the Böhler family. After that, silence. When Alfred Weidinger compiled Klimt’s complete paintings, he listed “Daphne” as missing, assigning it a catalogue number but no image.

Meanwhile, another Klimt painting lived a quiet, slightly misunderstood life under a different name: Girl with Blue Veil. It appeared in the 1967 catalogue raisonné by Novotny and Dobai, known only through an old black‑and‑white photograph, its measurements, and a brief provenance linking it to the Böhler collection and Galerie Neumann. No one suspected it might be the lost “Daphne.” When the painting finally resurfaced in Ottawa in 2001, Klimt scholars were astonished—not only by its beauty, but by the possibility that this long‑misplaced work had been hiding in plain sight for decades.

The resemblance between the auburn‑haired sitter and the pregnant figure in Hope I (1903), displayed beside it, was immediately striking. Yet the idea that this could be “Daphne” seemed unlikely at first. Where was Apollo? Where were the laurel leaves, the metamorphosis, the familiar iconography of Ovid’s tale? For years, these doubts kept scholars from pursuing the connection.

Bisanz‑Prakken’s contribution was to look again, more closely and more imaginatively. She showed that Klimt’s interpretation of the myth did not rely on literal transformation but on a subtler, inward shift. The painting’s quiet tension, the sitter’s turned posture, the veil that both conceals and reveals—these elements echo Ovid’s story in a way that is psychological rather than narrative. Once seen through that lens, the identification becomes not only plausible but compelling. The lost “Daphne” had been with us all along, simply wearing another name.

Whether one follows the full scholarly trail or simply enjoys the painting’s luminous presence, the rediscovery of Daphne feels like a small gift. It reminds us that Klimt’s world is still capable of surprises, and that even well‑charted oeuvres can hold their secrets a little longer than expected.