Adelina Müller (1863-1927) was the sixth child of the nineteen children of Carl Alois (Luigi) Müller (1825 – 1885) and his wife Genovefa Lombardi (1836 – 1920). She met her future husband Ernst Gähler (died 1932), a ‘Bleicherei und Fabrikant’, at the Hotel Löwen in Herisau, Canton Appenzell, Switzerland, then owned by her parents and where she had worked for a short while, and married him in 1898? It was a love match, and a very happy marriage, of which there were four offspring, three girls – Margrit, Irma and Erna – and a boy (who died as a child by drowning in a garden pond) probably called Ernst after his father. Only Irma Gahler (1899 – 1974), who married businessman Franz Josef Conrad (1899 – 1974) in London in October 1920 (he came from Bremgarten in Canton Aargau) had any offspring – a girl Irma Beatrix (Trixie) who was born in 1922, Rolf Ernest (Rolli) who was born in 1923, and Frank Peter (Peter) who was born in 1929 and died in 1991. Erna Gähler married Werner Minder (died 1989?), but there were no children of the marriage. Margrit Gähler, who died in 1988, was also unmarried.
The portrait before it was altered.
Comparison with an annotated photograph in an old album in the artist’s papers shows that the sitter was actually a ‘Mrs King’ who was painted by the artist in about 1895. It is known that the artist painted a Mrs. William F. King at that time, and in fact her portrait was exhibited at THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN, New York, October 31 – December 7, 1895 (see separate entry in Portraits A-Z).
Mrs. King’s face was depicted looking straight at the viewer and in her hair was a fashionable ‘Diana crescent’ of diamonds. Perhaps Mrs. King did not pay for her portrait, for the artist has clearly scraped out the head of Mrs. King and inserted the profile of his sister Adelina Gähler-Müller. At the same time he covered the décolletage of Mrs. King the New York socialite with suitable white material for his married sister.
