Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein
Austrian philanthropist (1882-1958)
Margaret "Gretl" Stonborough-Wittgenstein (19 September 1882 – 27 September 1958) was a sister of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the pianist Paul Wittgenstein and a member of the wealthy Viennese Wittgenstein family. She was the subject of a famous 1905 portrait painted for her wedding by the artist Gustav Klimt (Stonborough-Wittgenstein and other members of the Wittgenstein family were among Klimt's most important patrons), which was sold in 1960 by her son Thomas and may now be seen in the Alte Pinakothek gallery in Munich.
Biography
Marriage and children
On 7 January 1905, she married a wealthy American art collector, Jerome Stonborough (1873 – June 1938), who was of German Jewish ancestry and born Jerome Herman Steinberger; he had had his name changed to Stonborough in 1900. Margaret and Jerome were close friends with Hermann Rothe, and Margaret was the godmother of his daughter Margarethe. The couple had two sons and divorced in 1938; Jerome committed suicide shortly thereafter.
Her first son was Dr. Thomas Humphrey Stonborough (1906–1986). His Swiss friend Marguerite Respinger (1904–2000), whom he had met when he was studying in Cambridge and had invited to Vienna, was briefly (1926–1931) the only known female interest of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1939, Thomas married Elizabeth Churchill, but they soon divorced (she was to remarry Washington Evening Star columnist Constantine Brown, and became a journalist and anti-communist activist under the name of Elizabeth Churchill Brown). Haus Wittgenstein was owned by Thomas until 1968 when it was sold to a developer for demolition.
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