Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein

Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein belonged to those wealthy and highly cultured assimilated Jewish families who provided Klimt with most of his patrons and who indeed were the very backbone of Viennese culture during its brief and dazzling “golden age” between 1890 and the First World War.

This portrait met the fate of so many commissioned society portraits in failing to please the sitter. Two years after this portrait was painted, the king of society portraitists, John Singer Sargent gave up taking commissions of women, commenting bitterly that a portrait is just a picture of someone in which the mouth is “not quite right”. Klimt was required to make alterations before he could collect his handsome fee of 5,000 guilders. Although this portrait is relatively restrained compared to many of Klimt’s other paintings of the period, the highly-minded and intellectual Stonborough-Wittgenstein, may have been averse to Klimt’s highly ornamented style. Later she would commission her famous philosopher brother Ludwig Wittgenstein to design for her a villa in a severe, functionalist style that consciously reacted to the Byzantine excesses of the Vienna Secession.