Belvedere — Vienna, Austria

Summers by a lake in the Austrian countryside are where these came from — square canvases, a whole stack of them, a break from the portrait work that paid. He'd apparently pick a view through a hole cut in card rather than just look at what was in front of him.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.

There's actual gold leaf on this, plus silver and platinum — his father was a gold engraver, it's said, so he knew the trade before he ever painted. When it first went on show it was listed under a plainer name, just 'lovers'.

For years this was shown under a different biblical woman's name — people kept taking it for Salome — and that's supposedly why the right name ended up hammered into the metal at the top. A goldsmith brother of his made that frame, from what I can find, so the frame and the painting were meant to arrive as one object.