14 OCTOBER 2026

There are certain artists that even if they have a large body of work can become known for one singular piece. For example, Edvard Munch has The Scream and Grant Wood has American Gothic. You could even lump Leonardo da Vinci into this group with the Mona Lisa.

Gustav Klimt is another one who belongs on this list. While he produced over 200 paintings in his lifetime, the work below is probably the only one of his that most people know. The Kiss is instantly identifiable, as it’s one of those catalog staples that’s been printed on everything and anything. The painting has also been parodied extensively, and you can find versions with cats, dogs, and even the Muppets.

We’re not talking about The Kiss today, however. While it has an interesting story, we’re instead going to discuss other paintings of his and how they involve an ultra-rich family, the Nazis, and a life-saving lie.

Like many artists of the time, Klimt relied on wealthy patrons to stay flush with brushes and canvases, (not to mention cat food; apparently he had a lot of them). At the top of his patron list were August and Serena Lederer. Thanks to their huge distillery business, at one point they were the second-richest family in Vienna. They were also art collectors, and they commissioned several works from Klimt.

In 1899, Klimt was asked to paint Serena, who was considered a society grande dame and widely known for her beauty and opulent wardrobe. Thrilled with the result of the nearly life-size portrait, the two began a relationship that would last until Klimt’s death in 1918. (When he died, Serena proceeded to buy up all of the work in his estate, giving the Lederers the largest collection of his art in the world.)

Fifteen years after Klimt painted Serena, he was tasked with painting her 20-year-old daughter. Completed in 1916, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer shows her in a similar pose as in her mother’s portrait, and they do share a strong resemblance. But instead of the all-white gown mom wears, daughter is in a much more ornate and colorful outfit, and it may even contain a hidden message.

“If you look closely at the sitter’s robe, you’ll see two light blue dragons emerging from crested waves,” said Kirsten Appleyard, a curatorial assistant at the National Gallery of Canada. “What this tells us, along with a number of other symbols, is that this is an emperor’s cloak. While Klimt used Oriental motifs in other works, this is the only portrait that contains imperial iconography.”

Amazingly, Klimt also painted a third generation of the family: Serena’s mother and Elisabeth’s grandmother, Charlotte Pulitzer, who was the grandniece of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. (And to show you just how much Klimt was still dependent on the Lederers even as a well-known and well-respected artist, when finishing her mother’s portrait, he wrote to Serena asking for advance on “the meager rest of the fee,” adding “I am waiting for it like the devil—for a poor soul!”)

Sadly, the whereabouts of the painting are unknown. In 1940, the Nazis confiscated the Lederer’s art collection and transferred a lot of it to the Schloss Immendorf castle in Lower Austria. In 1945, a fired burned down the castle, and it’s believed that as many as 10 Klimt works – possibly including the portrait of Charlotte – were destroyed. This photograph is all the remains:

August Lederer died in 1936, and when the Nazis took over control of Austria a couple of years later, Serena – who was from a Jewish family – left for Hungary. Elisabeth decided to stay, however. After marrying the exceptionally-named Wolfgang von Bachofen-Echt in 1921, she converted to Protestantism. However, they divorced in 1938, which made Elisabeth suspectable to persecution.

This is when Elisabeth had an inspired idea: To mask her Jewish heritage, she’d claim to be Klimt’s illegitimate daughter. It was widely known that the artist dipped his brush into a lot of palettes, so to speak, and there were claims that he had as many as 14 children with several different women.

To protect her daughter, Serena went along with the story, and she even swore under oath that it was true. The Reich Department for Genealogical Research believed it, and while Elisabeth didn’t survive the war, the lie did offer somewhat of a safeguard from the terror of the Nazis.

One final note about Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth. He was paid 35,000 Austro-Hungarian crowns for the work – about $4,400 in U.S. currency – equivalent to around $135,000 today. While a nice payday, the work recently set a record as the most expensive modern art piece ever sold at auction, raking in $236.4 million. Not too bad for a poor soul.

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