#vienna

This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.

Her husband commissioned it — a banker, from what I've read — and it apparently took something like four years to finish. The Nazis took it off the family in 1941, and there was a long legal fight over it decades later before it ended up where it is now.

He'd walked out of the official Viennese art establishment years before this with a group who set up their own building to show in, which is roughly the world this belongs to. The reading you come across most often is that all the figures here are one girl dreaming herself into different lives — though as far as I can tell that's other people's guesswork, not anything he ever said.

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.