Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt.Sotheby's/Supplied
Ottawa art lovers may recognize a familiar face when a rare portrait by Gustav Klimt comes up for auction in New York next month, in a sale that is expected to break records.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer will be knocked down by Sotheby’s Nov. 8 and is expected to break the Austrian artist’s previous 2023 auction record of £85-million (about $158-million today). Prior to the Sotheby’s previews, the painting of a pale, dark-haired, young woman in a diaphanous dress and Chinese cloak was last seen in public at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
It had hung there from November, 2017, to September, 2025, lent by Leonard Lauder, the New York philanthropist, art collector and cosmetics executive who died in June. The Leonard Lauder Trust is selling the Klimt portrait and two Klimt landscapes, as well as six sculptures by Henri Matisse and works by Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen. The Lederer portrait – with liberal use of the decorative, mosaic-like patterning for which Klimt is famous including a background featuring Chinese figures – is the star of the 24-lot auction. It is expected to break the Klimt auction record set by Lady with a Fan in London two years ago, which was also the most expensive painting ever sold at a European auction.
It wound up in Ottawa on a long-term loan because Lauder wanted to pair it with Hope, a National Gallery painting of a naked pregnant woman with golden hair that is the only Klimt in a public collection in Canada.
Klimt's Hope I, 1903.National Gallery of Canada/Supplied
“Leonard felt it would be really meaningful to have the work he owned alongside Hope, which is such an important painting,” said David Resnicow, a spokesperson for the trust, explaining Lauder had a good experience with the gallery after lending a landscape to its 2001 Klimt exhibition, Modernism in the Making. That was the first comprehensive North American exhibition devoted to the artist known for introducing modern styles to Austria as a member of the Vienna Secession, so named because the artists broke from the conservative Association of Austrian Artists in 1897.
Prior to the 2001 Klimt show, Colin Bailey, who was chief curator and deputy director at the National Gallery at the time and knew the Lauder collection, approached him for the loan of Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee, which is also included in the Sotheby’s sale. That led, in turn, to the eventual loan of both paintings for the longer term.
Lauder was a notably generous donor: In 2013, he promised a collection of Cubist art estimated to be worth US$1.1-billion to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, making him one of the biggest philanthropists of all time, while in 2020 his brother Ronald donated 91 historic European weapons and pieces of armour for both men and horses to the museum. However, there was never any question that the portrait or the landscape would stay in Ottawa.
“These are the works he chose to hold onto and not donate,” Resnicow said of the Sotheby’s sale. He said the sale is necessary to settle the Lauder estate.
Leonard Lauder in 2018.ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
The Lederer portrait may also have been meaningful to Lauder because of some parallels with his family history. Lauder was the son of Joseph and Estée Lauder, founders of the cosmetics company that bears her name. His parents were descended from Jewish immigrants from Germany and Hungary, while his first wife, Evelyn, was a Viennese Jew who escaped Austria in 1938 as a small child.
Elisabeth Lederer was the child of August and Szerena Lederer and belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Vienna. She was Jewish, and evaded the Nazis partly through her connection to Klimt; she stayed on in Vienna until her death in 1944 at the age of 50. She had married a Protestant in 1921 and converted but was left unprotected when he divorced her in 1934.
Klimt had died in 1918, two years after completing her young portrait, but she insisted he was her real father, a story that seemed plausible because the artist was known for his many affairs, was close to the Lederer family and very attentive to Elisabeth. Her mother, who had retreated to Budapest, swore the same on an affidavit to save her daughter from the Nazis.
Today, historians doubt the story is true, but Lederer, a sculptor in her own right, lives on in Klimt’s painting.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed Ronald Lauder's donation of arms and armor to his brother Leonard. This version has been corrected.