A mother cradles her child in her arms in Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, swathed in a blue aura with a pattern that recalls Byzantine mosaics. The pair appear to sleep, unaware of our gaze. Beside them is an older woman, in a warmer aura of earthy tones, who hides her face between her hand and long, flowing hair.

The work represents the cycle of life in unflinching detail – including the folds of skin and sinewed arms of the older woman. Some say that, in separating the mother and child, Klimt is idealising youth and suggesting that life stops when a woman’s reproductive years pass, but others suggest that the work evokes the beauty and vulnerability of womanhood – a vision of femininity that eschews idealisation. To us, Klimt shows the beauty in all three states, offering a beguiling celebration of what it is to be a woman at any age.