Family Romance
John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family.
Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
In commissioning this grand series of paintings, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became Sargent’s greatest private patron and close friend. The Wertheimers worked with Rothschilds and royals, plutocrats and dukes—as did Sargent. Asher left most of his Sargent portraits to the National Gallery in London, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise: it was a new thing for a family of Jews to appear alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats and dignitaries painted by earlier masters.
Strouse’s account, set primarily in England around the turn of the twentieth century, takes in the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy and the dramatic rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. It travels back through hundreds of years to the Habsburg court in Vienna and forward to fascist Italy in the 1930s. Its depictions of Sargent, his sitters, their friendships and circles, and the portraits themselves light up a period that saw tumultuous social change and the birth of the modern art market.
Sargent brilliantly portrayed these transformations, in which the Wertheimers were key players. Family Romance brings their interwoven stories fully to life for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Strouse (Alice James) intricately sketches the longtime relationship between painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and a wealthy Jewish family in early 20th-century Britain. After being commissioned by art dealer Asher Wertheimer, Sargent spent nearly a decade painting Asher, his wife, and their 10 children. In 1923, the portraits were exhibited in the National Gallery, where the display of "wealthy, London-born Jews of German descent" alongside "Anglo-Saxon aristocrats" elicited mixed reactions. Members of the House of Commons petitioned for their removal, and some of Asher's associates took "offense" at the frank depiction of his traditionally "Jewish" features, but one art critic characterized the subjects' wealth and "beauty" as emblematic of the times. Strouse situates the family against the backdrop of a society in which aristocrats' fortunes were declining, while new fortunes, including those belonging to Jewish families, were "reorder the transatlantic social landscape." Nevertheless, Strouse notes, a "profound sense of otherness" characterized the Jewish experience in Britain and reflected a complicated clash between the old and the new that accelerated as the century wore on. The result is a nuanced portrait of a world in flux.
