Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905 CE)

In 1905 Gustav Klimt painted a tall, pale young woman in a cascading white dress and froze her against a wall of flat color and gold. Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein does not glitter like the later “golden” pictures, yet it already contains their tension: a living face set inside an almost architectural ornament. The sitter is twenty-two, about to marry, and already more intellectual than decorative. The painting that was meant to celebrate her wedding would become one of Klimt’s most revealing portraits precisely because neither painter nor model was quite satisfied with it.

A Wedding Commission from Vienna’s Steel Fortune

The picture was ordered by Karl Wittgenstein, the iron and steel magnate who had already bought several works from Klimt and had helped finance the Vienna Secession building. In early 1904 he and his wife Leopoldine asked the artist to paint their youngest daughter, Margarethe, known in the family as Gretl. Klimt accepted with pleasure but asked for a delay until mid-March. Work on the canvas continued into 1905.

Margaret married the American collector Jerome Stonborough on 7 January 1905. She belonged to one of the richest and most cultivated families in the Habsburg Empire: sister of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and of the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who would later lose his right arm in the First World War. The Wittgensteins were also major patrons of the Wiener Werkstätte, the workshop that designed the moiré velvet dress she wears in the portrait. The painting therefore sits at the intersection of industrial wealth, Secession taste, and a family that would later commission one of Vienna’s most severe modernist houses.

The Portrait That Lived in the Attic

Klimt prepared the painting with roughly thirty drawings, first in black chalk on Japanese paper, later in pencil. The studies show him hunting for the pose, the fall of the stole, and the exact moment when the figure would lock into the background. He kept changing the finished canvas as well. The dark horizontal band that cuts across the picture at knee height and the geometric panels at the top were later additions; he was not content with the first arrangement.

Margaret liked the result even less. Contemporary accounts say she banished the portrait to the attic of her summer house. Decades later a visitor looking at the dusty, unframed canvas asked whether it was really her. She answered that it was supposed to be, from the time she married his grandfather, but that it did not look like her, that there was too much dress, and that she did not find it beautiful. The painting fails to do justice to her independent, intellectual character; it freezes her in a decorative role she never fully accepted.

When Society Portraiture Became Modern

The work belongs to the great sequence of Klimt’s society portraits—Serena Lederer, Hermine Gallia, Fritza Riedler, and soon Adele Bloch-Bauer I—in which Viennese haute bourgeoisie presented itself as an aesthetic total work of art. What distinguishes this canvas is the almost programmatic contrast between two ways of seeing. Face, hands, and the shimmering dress are painted with a thin, almost photographic naturalism. The background is a flat architecture of rectangles, stripes, and a gold lunette of spirals and colored dots, closer to Josef Hoffmann’s interiors than to any real room. Depth disappears; the figure seems to float.

That opposition—painterly flesh against geometric plane—was a central principle of Viennese modernism and a rehearsal for the gold mosaics that would follow. The portrait is therefore both a document of a class that wanted every surface of life designed. 

Margaret later studied mathematics and physics, worked with Sigmund Freud, served as president of a Viennese arts-and-crafts society, and in the 1920s asked her brother Ludwig to help design Haus Wittgenstein. The woman who looks out from Klimt’s white dress was already moving toward a more austere modernity than the painting itself admits.

Canvas, Moiré, and a Changing Surface

The painting is oil on canvas and measures 179.8 cm high by 90.5 cm wide (70.8 by 35.6 inches). The extreme vertical format lengthens the figure and lets the dress pour downward like a column of light. Klimt applied the white of the Wiener Werkstätte moiré velvet in very thin layers so that embroidery, folds, and even traces of the underdrawing remain visible. A matching stole with floral stitching crosses the shoulders and falls in front, creating a white-on-white play of pattern against sheen. 

Photographs and later technical comparison show that Klimt altered the background after the first campaign of work. He introduced a dark band with checkerboard accents to separate the colored fields and added ornamental patterns behind the head. The result is a surface that feels both finished and still slightly provisional, as if the geometry had been laid over an earlier, softer room.

From a Summer-House Attic to Munich

After Margaret’s death in 1958 the portrait passed to her son Thomas H. W. Stonborough. In 1960 the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen purchased it from him for the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. It remains there today, exhibited on the ground floor, still in its original frame. The journey from a rejected wedding gift stored out of sight to a central work in a public collection is part of the picture’s meaning: what one family found too stiff or too ornamental later generations recognized as a precise image of a world on the edge of modernism.