Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein
Margaret "Gretl" Stonborough-Wittgenstein 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, 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, 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. His Swiss friend Marguerite Respinger, whom he had met when he was studying in Cambridge and had invited to Vienna, was briefly the only known female interest of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1939, Thomas married Elizabeth Churchill, but they soon divorced. Haus Wittgenstein was owned by Thomas until 1968 when it was sold to a developer for demolition.
Her second son was Major John Jerome Stonborough, who, although a US citizen, served in the Canadian Army during Second World War as an intelligence officer and interpreter. He married Veronica Morrison-Bell, daughter of Sir Claude William Hedley Morrison-Bell, 2nd Baronet, and after the war lived between Britain and Austria.