Klimt's Tree of Life is a design for a golden mosaic, made between about 1908 and 1911 for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet, a private mansion in Brussels. Its spirals carry Egyptian symbols, and one art historian ties the whole tree to the myth of Osiris. The original is still on the wall of a house the public cannot enter.
The banker and art lover Adolphe Stoclet had the house built between 1905 and 1911 by the architect Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte. Klimt was commissioned to decorate the dining room.
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There is not one Tree of Life in that dining room. There are two, one on each of the long walls, and the second answers the first from the opposite side. The narrow wall between them holds something else entirely, a knight on a throne.
The golden image on posters and mugs shows only a piece of one of those trees. Klimt drew it first on paper, in nine full size sheets, and wrote instructions on them for the craftsmen who were to build the wall. Those sheets are now in a museum in Vienna, not in Brussels. The mosaic itself stayed where it was made, in the house.
What You'll Discover
What the poster version really is.
Who stands at each end of the frieze.
Whose eye watches from the branches.
Which myth the tree may recall.
Why no one can walk in and see it.