Escaped the Nazis and lost by Australia
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She stands tall with her head tilted towards you. She's looking in your direction, but not at you.
She's sort of staring off into space. She's got a kind of contemplative, almost melancholy expression. And she is wearing fabulous clothes.
Fabulous is the word. It's this loose, flowing gown made of the most beautiful fabric. It almost looks like an explosion of tissue-like silk. There are layers and layers of white. And frankly, the whole thing just screams money. This is a society person. But this society woman will see things in her time that will shock and disturb her. She'll see her world turned upside down and travel to the other side of the earth to keep her family safe, only to be rejected by one of Australia's most important institutions.
In hindsight, it is one of the most terrible blunders of an Australian art museum.
I'm Mark Finnell, and this is the riddle of a mysterious artwork, a portrait painted by a man who would go on to be one of the most famous in the world.
In Vienna, he was always regarded as the greatest artist of the early 20th century.
He was smuggled out in a time of war and destruction, only to reside in Sydney, Australia, in an apartment full of treasures. But how it made it to the harbourside city, and where it ended up next, well that, I can assure you, no one saw it coming.
The portrait is pretty much life-size. It's 1.7 metres high. She's standing. She's wearing this extraordinary outfit which almost certainly was designed and made for the occasion of her standing for this portrait. She's also got great jewellery. She's got a brooch which has got two big solitaire diamonds.
What first impression does the Klimt portrait of Hermine Gallia give?
She... has pearl earrings, she has a couple of rings, one of which is the gold band of her wedding ring. She both kind of looks at the viewer but also looks through the viewer.
This is Tim Bonahedi. He's an art historian and a lawyer. The woman in the painting Tim's describing is elegant and graceful. Her name is Hermine Gallia.
She has come to Vienna to marry her uncle, which was then unusual, but nowhere near as unusual as it is now. And her uncle, Moritz Gallia... has come to Vienna. And he has made a fortune with one of the great Austrian inventions of the turn of the century, which was the gas mantle. And there's a period in the 1890s, early 1900s, where the gas mantle rivals and in some ways eclipses electric lighting.
Around this time, at the sort of turn of the 20th century, Vienna is one of the great metropolises of the world.
It's one of the ten biggest cities in the world with a population of over two million people. It is one of the most dynamic cities of the world when it comes to art, literature, ideas to a certain extent. But it was also a city of class disparities. There were still aristocrats of great wealth and power. There was new upper middle class, many of whom were Jews who had moved to Vienna, particularly from 1867 when they got freedom of movement and occupation. and so it was a city of great luxury and extraordinary cultural institutions and sort of private and public palaces and it was a city of great poverty where a very significant proportion of the population lived big families crammed into one or two rooms very low income so it was a city of huge discrepancy
So this is the world that our woman in the portrait lives in. Hermina is incredibly wealthy and is the mistress of a huge household.
She probably, in 1903, has five or six full-time staff. She would have had a full-time cook. She would have had... staff who were specialised in helping in the kitchen and serving a table. She would have had others who cleaned and she would have had a governess who, in addition to speaking German, spoke French and probably English and was there partly to give the children that kind of trilingualism so they could appear in society as educated, cosmopolitan Europeans.
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