Nicolas de Gunzburg
American banker and socialite
Nicolas Louis Alexandre de Gunzburg (French pronunciation: [ni.kɔ.lɑ lwi a.lɛɡ.zɑ̃.dʁə d(ə) ɡœ̃z.byʁ]; 12 December 1904 – 20 February 1981), also known as Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, was a French-born magazine editor and socialite. He became an editor at several American publications, including Town & Country, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1971.
Background and family
Baron Nicolas "Niki" de Gunzburg was born in Paris, France, a scion of a wealthy and influential Russian-Jewish family, whose fortune had been made in banking and oil. The Günzburgs, as they were originally known, were ennobled during the 1870s by Louis III, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. When family members began spending a great deal of time in France later in the century, the umlaut was dropped and the particle "de" adopted. Their Hessian title was made hereditary in 1874 by Czar Alexander II of Russia.
His father was Baron Gabriel Jacob "Jacques" de Gunzburg (1853–1929), a nephew of the Russian philanthropist Baron Horace Günzburg. His Brazilian-born mother, Enriqueta "Quêta" de Laska (died 1925), was of Polish and Portuguese descent, a daughter of Doña Joaquina Maria Marqués de Lonza Lisboa; she had been previously married to French collector and bibliophile Germain Bapst (1853–1921) and married thirdly, after her divorce from Jacques de Gunzburg, Prince Basil Narischkine.
Raised primarily in England, where his father worked for the bankers Hirsch & Co.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nicolas de Gunzburg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.