A new kind of portrait: Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein

The Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein is one of Gustav Klimt's great female portraits in which he portrayed ladies from Viennese society, including Friederike Maria Beer, Serena Lederer, and last but not least, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The dramatic story behind Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) was filmed in 2015 under the title Woman in Gold.

As part of the Neue Pinakothek collection, the portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein marks how the portrait genre was radically transformed from the lordly portraits of Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough during the late 18th century, to the depictions of bourgeois self-consciousness by Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, right through to the "highly stylized glorification of modern society around 1900," as Ernst Ruhmer wrote in reference to this painting.

In fact, one has to wonder whether the portrait of the well-educated, "unconventional" sister of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and pianist Paul Wittgenstein did justice to her personality.