The archive / Art Nouveau / The Kiss
The Kiss
Gustav Klimt · 1862–1918
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Part of The Gold Wall — 3 prints, one $18 download.
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 24×24″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 36×36″.
[ Will it fit your frame? ]
The work
Real gold, silver and platinum, worked into the canvas.
Look close and the surface is metal. Klimt laid actual leaf into the two embracing figures — gold, silver and platinum — bound with resin-oil colours over a canvas primed in zinc white. The field behind them is composition gold, a thin glaze of brass scattered with stray flakes of leaf. The light reaches it before it reaches them.
By another name
It was first shown simply as 'Lovers.'
The title everyone knows came late. When Klimt hung the painting at the 1908 Kunstschau in Vienna, it carried a plainer name: 'Liebespaar' — Lovers. 'Der Kuss,' The Kiss, only settled into place by the autumn of 1909, more than a year after the canvas first went on the wall.
Why it matters
The state bought it on the spot, for a small fortune.
Most paintings wait for a buyer. This one sold straight off the wall at the 1908 show, bought by the Austrian Ministry of Art for the Moderne Galerie — forerunner of today's Belvedere. The price ran to roughly 25,000 crowns. That was more than half the cost of a stately villa, and well past the 8,000 to 10,000 Klimt asked for a portrait.
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Kiss
- Artist
- Gustav Klimt
- Year
- 1908
- Medium
- Oil & gold leaf on canvas
- Original
- 180 × 180 cm
- Collection
- Belvedere, Vienna
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · faithful reproduction (PD-Art) · Belvedere, Vienna — Inv. 912. Digital image: Google Cultural Institute via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
