Stehend von vorne mit kleiner Wendung nach links (Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein)

The young woman depicted in the present drawing is Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1882 - 1958), the heiress to one of the wealthiest Austrian families at the turn of the twentieth century. On the occasion of her marriage to the American chemist Jerome Stonborough in January 1905, her parents commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint her wedding portrait, for which this is one of several drawings that the artist completed. The final portrait is now on view in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the present work comes directly from the family of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s descendants.

The sitter’s father was Karl Wittgenstein – a steel magnate who had acquired an enormous fortune at the end of the nineteenth century and was known as the Austrian Andrew Carnegie. By 1898 he retired from business and focused on philanthropy and the arts, becoming an important patron to the Viennese Secession movement and Wiener Werkstätte. Advised by his daughter Hermine, Karl Wittgenstein amassed a large collection of fine and applied art, including numerous drawings and at least five oil paintings by Klimt. In 1899 he commissioned Josef Hoffman to adapt and extend his country house in Lower Austria, and then in 1904 commissioned Hoffman and Koloman Moser to design the interior for his daughter Margaret’s Berlin apartment.

Thus, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein grew up immersed in the intellectual and cultural spheres of Vienna through the social connections of her family and was physically surrounded by the modern innovations of architecture and design of the Viennese Secession. She herself would become the president of the Vienna Arts and Crafts Society and in 1926 commissioned her brother Ludwig and the architect Paul Engelmann to create Haus Wittgenstein (also known as The Stonborough House) – a modernist town house in Vienna which would become a national monument in 1971.