"Gustav Klimt, a denizen of Viennese bohemia, has already made a painter's name for himself when a well-to-do businessman commissions him to draw his young daughters' portraits. Thus the lives of this permanent fixture in the world's artistic firmament and his mistress-to-be, Emilie Floge, intersect. Alternating flash-forwards to mid-World War II, when the Old World truly crumbled and Klimt was long dead, frame the story with a perfect nostalgia for the novel's "real" time: the beautifully expressed charting of the growing relationship between Klimt and Emilie, who eventually runs a fashion house in the Austrian capital and dresses all the ladies of the arts world"