Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also sometimes called “Woman in Gold” or “Lady in Gold”), Gustav Klimt; gold leaf, silver leaf, and oil on canvas; 55 x 55 inches (140 x 140 cm); in the collection of the Neue Galerie, New York.

Link is to the file page for the Neue Galerie version of the image on Wikimedia Commons.

This and The Kiss are the most widely recognized works by 19th century Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt.

Both paintings are from Klimt’s “Golden Phase”, in which — inspired by the use of gold leaf in Byzantine mosaics in Venice and Ravenna — he began to incorporate gold leaf into his paintings. This is the most elaborate of his works from the period, incorporating not only the metal leaf, but bas-relief created with dimensional applications of gesso.

It is titled “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” because Klimt painted a second, much less complex and dramatic portrait of her.

There is a Wikipedia page devoted to the painting that goes into more detail, including the sexual subtext of its imagery and the story of its disposition and seizure by the Nazi regime.

You will find many images of this work that are much brighter, more saturated and shifted in hue — even on the Wikipedia article about the painting.

However, if you follow that link to Wikimedia Commons, as I did, you will find a very different, darker and considerably more subdued version of the image as supplied by the Neue Galerie. The Wikimedia editors indicate the Neue Galerie image has superseded the brighter version as the recommended version of the image.

The bright version looks to me like it suffers — as do so many online art images — from someone throwing the image into Photoshop and cranking up the brightness and saturation because the more faithful image isn’t “pretty” enough.

However, at the risk of being hoist on my own petard, I have slightly increased the exposure on the version of the Neue Galerie’s image that I’m showing here.

it has been my experience in regard to images with which I’m personally familiar, that many museums and galleries post images of works in their collections that are darker than the real object. (Why this is so still eludes me.)

I have not had the pleasure of seeing this painting in person, but my guess is that the appearance of the real work is somewhere between the two versions, and closer to the Neue Galerie version. If someone who has seen the work in person can correct me, please do. I’ve based my adjustment on images of other works by Klimt from the same time period.

Still life with Orange and Plum, Robert Spear Dunning; oil on canvas, roughly 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm); link is to image file page on Wikimedia Commons; as far as I know, the original is in a private collection.

19th century American painter Robert Spear Dunning gives us an elegantly simple painting of an orange and a plum. His exposure of the interior of the orange, and his meticulous eye for texture and color, lend the painting a feeling of complexity comparable to a more elaborate composition.

Though he also painted landscapes, Dunning’s primary subjects were arrangements of fruits or vegetables, occasionally augmented with dishware.

Dunning was sometimes criticized for continuing traditions from the middle of the century into a later period when they had fallen out of favor, a characteristic for which I admire him.