The woman in gold in the true story Woman in Gold was Adele Bloch-Bauer, a patron of the arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a regal beauty who posed for Gustav Klimt. Her portrait hung in the family's apartment on the Elisabethstrasse until March 1938, when Hitler's Third Reich annexed Austria. The lives of the city's thriving Jewish community were forever changed, and the Klimt, along with other artwork, jewelry, and valuables belonging to the Bloch-Bauers, was seized by the Nazis.