Emilie Flöge, the woman long rumored to be the woman in Gustav Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss, possessed the usual suspects of beauty and charm, but she was also an innovative fashion designer, businesswoman, and radical. Klimt painted three paintings of her: in an early one, she is simply a face in a crowd, a famous portrait of her which she and her family loathed so much that he felt obliged to sell it and probably The Kiss.
Adele Bloch-Bauer was a wife of a Viennese banker, and also art patron, philanthropist, a prominent member of the wealthy society of Vienne of that time. She had posed for two of Klimt's "Golden Period" portraits, and as some believed for The Kiss.
A red-haired woman from Budapest Hilde Roth, or Red Hilda as she often is called, modeled in many paintings by Gustav Klimt. She was a model for Danae, Lady with Hat and Feather boa, and Goldfish. It is even said she could have been the model for The Kiss.
The subject of the painting The Kiss gives a lot of interpretations. The most popular one is that Gustav Klimt captured the moment of a kiss between Apollo and Daphne in the Greek myth, Metamorphoses. Although Daphne transformed into a laurel tree to escape the love of Apollo, he still embraces her. Some historians have suggested that The Kiss reflects the moment when Orpheus turns to caress his love Eurydice as he loses her forever, from the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus.