Portrait of Adele: Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned this portrait of his own wife, then watched Klimt spend three years and hundreds of preparatory drawings making it.

The painting sold for $135 million in 2006. Before that, the Austrian government spent decades insisting it wasn't stolen. It was. Adele's niece fought them in court and won. The gold was always hers.

📖 The Story Behind This Piece

Klimt completed the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I in 1907, after three years of study sketches that number in the hundreds. The painting is almost flat in a traditional compositional sense — Adele barely separates from her background because Klimt didn't want her to. The gold leaf ornament covering her dress, the chair, the space around her face: all of it is drawn from Egyptian motifs, Byzantine mosaics, and Japanese Rimpa screens that Klimt had been cataloguing for years. She looks out from inside the gold rather than in front of it.

Klimt had been making decorative paintings since his twenties, working on commission for Viennese theaters and public buildings. Around 1899, he broke with that approach entirely. He began painting the body as something to be dissolved into surface, into pattern, into gold. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is where that idea reached full force. The ornamentation doesn't frame the subject. It consumes her, and she consents to it.

🎁 Who Gets One of These

A few kinds of people buy this one specifically, and the reasons are more different than you'd expect.

✔️ The collector who saw the Neue Galerie exhibition — You know the painting is smaller in person than it looks in photographs. You also know it's more overwhelming. A puzzle built around that gold-on-gold surface gives you something the gallery visit couldn't.
✔️ The person who watched "Woman in Gold" — Maria Altmann's legal fight against the Austrian government lasted seven years. Anyone who followed that story closely will find the painting carries a different weight than most Art Nouveau work.
✔️ The graphic designer or textile artist drawn to Klimt's ornamentation — The Byzantine circles, Egyptian eye motifs, and Japoniste spirals in this painting are a graduate seminar in decorative synthesis. Assembly forces close reading of every motif in the field.
✔️ The museum member who wants something to hang — At the Neue Galerie it's behind glass. Framed at home in the 23"x31" format, it reads differently — as an object you built rather than one you observed.
✔️ The gift-giver who needs something that references a specific story — The restitution history makes this a painting about family, about what survives theft, about a niece who didn't let it go. That's a conversation starter most gifts aren't.

Strong occasions: birthdays for anyone who owns art books or museum memberships; significant anniversaries where the gift needs to carry weight; holiday gifts for the person who already owns everything they need.

🧩 Puzzle Specifications

✔️ Precision laser-cut wooden pieces
✔️ 3mm MDF core — rigid, warp-resistant, built to last
✔️ UV printing directly on wood — no paper laminate, no peeling
✔️ Traditional grid-cut design
✔️ Handcrafted wooden keepsake box included
✔️ Made to order — ships in 3–4 weeks

💎 Why This Puzzle Lasts

Most wooden puzzle makers charge $300–$500. The craft justifies it. WAWW gets to the same place differently: direct manufacturing, no wholesale markup, made to order with no warehouse inventory. Same materials, honest price.

The 3mm MDF core is rigid enough that pieces click cleanly years from now, after the box has been opened and closed dozens of times. Cardboard warps, delaminates, and eventually refuses to lie flat. MDF doesn't. UV printing directly onto the wood surface means there's no paper laminate to peel at the edges — the ink lives in the wood grain, not on top of it. For a painting this dependent on surface variation, that distinction shows up in the assembled image.

The traditional grid cut means pieces have a satisfying mechanical snap. No gimmick shapes, no arbitrary outlines — just clean interlocking geometry that holds the completed image flat and stable. The handcrafted wooden keepsake box that comes with the puzzle is built to the same standard as the puzzle itself. Most people keep it. After the puzzle is framed or stored, the box earns a shelf on its own. Every puzzle is made to order, which means nothing sits in a warehouse. Your copy is cut and printed when you buy it. The three-to-four week lead time is the cost of that process, and it's worth it.

The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I has been in a courtroom, in a national gallery, and in Ronald Lauder's collection. It holds up to scrutiny from across a living room too.