Lady with Feather Hat, 1910

Around 1909-1910, Klimt moved on from his “Byzantine” style and abandoned the use of gold and silver. His brushwork became looser and bolder and his work showed an increased response to the remarkable developments in French painting over the previous four decades. The exhibitions of the Secession gave Klimt plenty of opportunity to study modern French painting at first hand. In particular the sixteenth exhibition of the Secession in 1903 presented the work of Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon, Denis, Vuillard and Bonnard. Rather like his musical contemporary Puccini, Klimt was an eclectic capable of stealing whatever he needed from the most varied sources and making it his own. In the case of the The Black Feather Hat, it was perhaps Toulouse-Lautrec who had the most to offer him. The picture has a poster-like boldness of design. Klimt certainly knew of Lautrec’s epoch-making poster of Aristide Bruant with a scarlet muffler cutting across Bruant’s chin. As this picture was not a commissioned portrait, Klimt could afford to take a similar liberty with his sitter.