In Family Romance, Bancroft Prize winning author Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent’s portraits of the Wertheimer family.
Strouse 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 London’s National Gallery, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise.
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.
For this talk at The Courtauld, exploring the relations between dealers, collectors and artists, Strouse will be in conversation with James McAuley, prize-winning author of The House of Fragile Things.
Organised by Dr Tom Stammers, Reader in Art and Cultural History at The Courtauld, as part of an ongoing series of talks in conjunction with the new MA in Art and Business.
Speakers:
Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier and Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. Her new book, Family Romance, John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Manchester University Press in the UK.
James McAuley is the author of The House of Fragile Things, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2021. A former Paris correspondent for The Washington Post, his writing has appeared in the Best American Essays anthology of 2024 and in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Liberties.
