The Old Burgtheater, 1888

Klimt’s 1888 gouache of the auditorium in the Old Burgtheater provides a valuable document, not only of the Viennese theatre-going public of his day but also of the historic theatre in which Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro had first been performed in 1786. Unfortunately, the theatre was later demolished to make way for the pompous new wing of the Hofburg palace. Despite the quasi-photographic realism of the individual figures the overall effect of this picture is curiously stilted and artificial as if it were an elaborate collage, with the figures not interacting with one another or even inhabiting the same space. Far removed from the exciting and innovative styles that Klimt would develop a decade later, or indeed that Van Gogh and Gauguin were developing in France in that very year, this meticulous and skilful gouache found favour with the arbiters of official taste in Vienna. In 1890 it won the artist the Emperor’s Prize of 4,000 guilders.