The Three Ages of Woman, 1905

The ageing process and in particular that of women was a traditional subject and had been depicted by Renaissance artists such as Hans Baldung Grien and Giorgione. The human life cycle was a common preoccupation of artists of the Symbolist era. Klimt would have been familiar with Arnold Böcklin. 1888 painting Vita somnuium breve that deals with the stages of life from babyhood to death and also with Munch’s 1894 The Three Stages of Woman that deals somewhat misogynistically with the three aspects of woman as virgin, whore and death rather than with the ageing process as such. Klimt’s tender and painfully honest treatment of the aged woman is perhaps the most remarkable feature of this picture. He may have been inspired by Rodin’s moving depiction of the frailty of age in his small bronze entitled, She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife. Fourteen of Rodin’s sculptures were included in the tenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1901. Though Klimt would later develop a looser and more painterly technique, his careful delineation of the complex, knotty anatomy of the old woman and the hatched shading of her concave buttock, show that he was always essentially a draughtsman who painted, rather than a lover of belle peinture for its own sake.