Violet B. Wenner

Baroness Violet Beatrice Wenner (1884 – December 7, 1970 ) was an English-American artist known for her portraiture. She painted a wide range of prominent individuals, including crowned heads of Europe, American politicians, scientists and industrialists.

Biography Wenner was born in the first quarter (January, February or March) of 1884 in Manchester, England, to a Swiss father Alfred Wenner and his Austrian-born second wife Malvine Egloff and grew up on The Hill near Alderley Edge, Cheshire. Her brother was Max Wenner. In later life, she made a wide array of claims about the specific year of her birth within the 1880s.

Wenner had an exhibit of her work at Pisco's Gallery in Vienna in about 1908.

Wenner was married in 1911 near the family home in Alderley Edge to a captain of the Ulanen and gentleman in waiting to the King of Württemberg, Adolf Conrad von Sternenfels.

The couple divorced in approximately 1920 and the Baroness moved to the United States in 1922, Her residence of many years was the Italian Court Building at 619 N. Michigan on the Magnificent Mile. When the Italian Court Building was due to be demolished in the late 1960s, she moved to the St. Clair Hotel. She had a large collection of crystal and porcelain objects of the Napoleon III period that she sold to a Florida museum. Kaiser Wilhelm, "the great scientist Eugene Steinbach" [ Eugen Steinach?], Bishop Charles Palmerston Anderson, Amy Leslie, William Hohenzollern, Emperor Franz Joseph, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Clara Clemens, Maria Jeritza, and Charles Curtis.