Belvedere Museum, Austria Reproduction Oil Paintings

The Belvedere Museum consists of a group of historic buildings in the center of Vienna, Austria. The building complex includes two Baroque palaces, the Upper and Lower Belvedere, the Orangery, and the Palace Stables. The complex was built in the 18th century by Prince Eugene of Savoy.

When did the Belvedere become a museum?

In 1776 members of the Austrian royal family who owned the Belvedere Museum started to move Imperial art collections from their various other royal palaces to the Upper and Lower Belvedere. As a result, the Belvedere is one of the first public museums in the world. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was given the Upper Belvedere as his residence in 1896. Still, a Modern Gallery was opened in 1903 in the Orangery to house purchases of paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet. 

Why is the Belvedere Museum famous?

At the end of World War I, the Belvedere complex and garden were given to the Austrian State as museums to house some of the works of art in the Imperial Austrian collection. After World War II, the Upper Belvedere became the state museum of Austria; housing works by the most famous Austrian artists, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The most famous painting in the Belvedere is The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt.

The Belvedere Museum, Controversy, and Artworks Looted by the Nazis

Holocaust survivor Alice Morgenstern filed a claim in 1959 stating that Four Trees by Egon Schiele, at the time in the Upper Belvedere, was stolen from her family in World War II. However, in 2020 the Austrian Government gave the painting back to her heir.

A further five paintings by Gustav Klimt, held in the Belvedere, were returned to the heirs of Adele Block-Bauer. Of these, the world famous 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer is the most well-known, considered as much a masterpiece as Gustav Klimt's The Kiss.

In 2006, the Adele Bloch Bauer painting returned to the ownership of the 90 year old Maria Altmann (born Maria Bloch-Bauer).  She later sold it to art collector Ronald Lauder for $135 million. Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, owns the Neue Galerie in New York City, where the painting now resides.

The four other paintings were sold at Christie’s in New York in 2006 for $193 million, including Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II, sold to Oprah Winfrey for $88 million.

Buy high quality art reproductions by famous artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Edgar Degas from our Belvedere Museum collection of replica art.