Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding figure of the Vienna Secession. Working at the turn of the twentieth century, he became the leading decorative painter of his generation, celebrated for an ornamental style of extraordinary richness.

His luminous 'golden phase' — gilded surfaces, intricate pattern and sensuous figuration — produced some of the most recognised images in Western art, among them The Kiss. Klimt's fusion of the symbolic and the decorative continues to define the visual language of Viennese modernism.