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With what mixture of emotions Knips regarded the portrait that brought Klimt his first great success, we can only speculate. Sonia Knips also commissioned Josef Hoffmann to design a country house for her family in 1903 and then a family sepulcher in 1919. But the last thing Hoffmann designed for Sonia Knips – and his last urban villa – was a masterpiece on a level with Klimt's portrait.
Villa Knips (1924-25) possesses an impressive Arts & Crafts façade, accented by rows of diamond-shaped ornaments that mimic the design of the windowpanes. Even the patio furniture, similar in shape to Hoffmann's ground-breaking designs for the Purkersdorf Sanitarium, was all angles. Christine Ehrlich, a pupil of Hoffmann's, executed the exterior stucco decorative work. The interior, however, was designed by Dagobert Peche (“the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque” according to Berta Zuckerkandl).
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The young woman wearing a conventionally feminine ruffled dress who grasps the arms of her chair, slightly tense, in 1897 became a patron of one of the keenest aesthetic sensibilities of her day. Did Klimt the painter miss some aspect of her personality or, having been overlooked by the egotistical artist, did Knips choose to withhold her depths from his gaze?