Eurographics - Klimt, The Kiss 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Klimt's The Kiss, the most reproduced painting of the Vienna Secession, and one of the few puzzles where the two halves of the picture need completely different tactics.

What you are looking at

Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss between 1907 and 1908, at the height of what is now called his Golden Period, using real gold leaf alongside oil. Two figures kneel on a bank of flowers, wrapped in a single gold cloak. He cups her face; she has her eyes closed and her hand over his. It hangs in Vienna and it is the picture people mean when they say Klimt.

The detail worth knowing before you start: the two robes are decorated in deliberately opposite ways. His half is hard-edged black, white and grey rectangles. Hers is soft concentric circles, ovals and flower roundels in red, blue, violet and green. Below them, a meadow of small flowers on green. Behind them, a flat field of bronze gold.

What it is like to build

Those two robes split the puzzle for you and they could not be easier to tell apart. Rectangles in one pile, circles in the other. His side is high contrast and goes together fast. Her side is all gold at the same brightness with the roundels scattered through it, so use the roundels as landmarks and fill between them.

The gold background is the hard part and it is roughly a quarter of the picture. It is not flat: Klimt worked it with mottling and small scratches, so pieces do differ, just not much. Sort it by how warm the gold is, from greenish bronze at the edges to a paler yellow near the figures, and do it last.

The flower meadow at the bottom is the fastest region, dense with small saturated marks on green, and worth doing early because it closes the bottom edge.

Why the EuroGraphics build matters on a painting

EuroGraphics are Canadian, based in Montreal, and they print on recycled board with vegetable-based inks over a blue-cored board, which is why a EuroGraphics piece has that distinctive edge and holds a firm, positive fit. On a large field of near-identical gold, a definite click is the only confirmation the picture is not going to give you.

Specifications

A little context

Fine art is a pillar of what we stock, and the reason a painting makes a good puzzle is rarely that it is famous. It is whether the artist gave the surface enough variety to navigate. Klimt is close to ideal for it because the ornament is the subject: there is always another pattern to find. Van Gogh works for the same reason and a different one, the brushstrokes, see Irises. More at Art.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.