WOERISHOFFER, Mrs Charles (Frederika Anna Uhl)
Description:
Of oblong format. Seated in a wicker chair before a lake-filled landscape.
Location:
Present whereabouts unknown.
The sitter (1850-1931) was the daughter of Jacob Uhl and Anna Behr Uhl (later the wife of Oswald Ottendorfer). The Woerishoffer’s wealth derived mainly from the German-language New York newspaper, the Neue Yorker Staats-Zeitung, but also from the the success which her husband, banker Charles Woerishoffer (died 1886) had had on Wall Street. She had two daughters, both of whom predeceased her and both of whom Muller-Ury painted: Countess Charles (Antoinette “Nettie”) Seilern once and Carola Woerishoffer twice. After Mrs Woerishoffer’s death in 1931 the three Seilern grandsons inherited her fortune – since both her her daughters were dead – which Muller-Ury told his sister Lina Muller in a letter in 1942 was some $18 million.
Painted in around 1912-16, when it is known she lived in Vienna to be near her Seilern grandsons, and was therefore possibly painted in Austria (or Switzerland).
Her sister Emma Uhl, married Adolph Schalk, of the Schalk Brothers Brewery, and the Schalk family had married into the Ruppert brewing family, of which Muller-Ury painted the mother of Colonel Jacob Ruppert and George Ehret Ruppert (destroyed in a fire), and Cornelia Ruppert who married conductor Nahan Franko (lost).
