When London’s National Gallery exhibited nine portraits by John Singer Sargent in 1923, a magazine ran a cartoon of Rembrandt, Velázquez and other greats welcoming him. “Well done,” they say. “You’re the first master to break the rule and get in here alive.”
Sargent (1856-1925) really does seem the last old master. While his peers absorbed the upheavals of modernity, the American painter, who was born in Florence and spent most of his career in Paris and London, stuck to a decorous spirit of portraiture that hadn’t changed much since the 17th century: full-length poses, bottomless blacks, finery, a spotlighted realism that sought the essence of a gaze.
He painted presidents, magnates and eminent writers. So some brow-raising met the National’s acquisition of so many pictures of ascendant London Jews from a single clan. They are now the subject of “Family Romance,” Jean Strouse’s brisk, wise and admiring survey of an unusually long client relationship that signaled a tenuous shift in British society.
Samson Wertheimer came from Bavaria in 1839, and built a business dealing antiques and his own copies, especially the fashionable gilt bronze furnishings called ormolu. The royal warrant on Samson’s stationery was tangible proof of success; he dealt equally to other Jewish families.
Samson’s son Asher moved into art with acquisitions of Dutch masters. How Asher met Sargent is not known, but by 1898 Sargent had captured his client’s wife, Flora, drenched in lace and pearls, looking rich and a little weary. (She later requested a redo.) In the companion portrait, Asher stands with a thumb hooked into his vest and holding a cigar, his eyes knowing and bottom lip slightly moist.
“Pleasantly engaged in counting golden shekels,” mocked one viewer. Casual antisemitism was a common reaction as the portraits debuted one by one at the Royal Academy, and later as Parliament debated the acquisition. Strouse confronts prejudice unblinkingly but with a historian’s grace for evolving mores.
The painter so frequented the Wertheimer dining room that the family nicknamed it “Sargent’s Mess.” Not everyone in his circle was equally impressed; Claude Monet described a visit to the palatial house as “nothing but Jews” and “very relaxed manners despite a high degree of elegance.”
The family was large and varied. Alfred wanted to be an actor, which chafed his father; Sargent duly paints him aloof, amid tomes and beakers — a more respectable career. He died at 26 of a morphine overdose. The more dutiful Edward was dead in 1902 of a bad oyster, and stands unfinished on canvas. Sargent was closest to Ena, the eldest daughter, whom he twice captured — in a glittering double likeness with her sister Betty, and three years later in a dashing cavalier’s costume.
In recent memory, authors have taken on Sargent’s best-known works. The breadth of the Wertheimers, by contrast, lends Strouse’s book the feel of an old-school biography compendium in the vein of “Eminent Victorians.”
Strouse’s acquisition of a small trove of letters written from Sargent to “my dear Ena” fleshes out their special relationship. In his biography, Paul Fischer argues that Sargent, tightly buttoned-up and almost certainly a homosexual, found in the steamrolling Ena a kind of ideal self. Strouse touches on Sargent’s “otherness,” too, though with more reserve. Like his friend Henry James, Sargent was an American in England. In that shared exile Strouse draws convincing parallels to the Wertheimers’ religious minority.
The book at times lacks the internal combustion of longer histories. Strouse has previously written a biography of Henry’s sister, Alice James, and a remarkably humanizing doorstop on J. Pierpont Morgan.
No surprise, then, that “Family Romance” shines when portraying the groundswells altering high society. This was a moment when industry and finance threatened the old agrarian wealth of the British peerage. The Settled Land Act of 1882 allowed them to sell off some land, but art was more liquid. Cue the dealers, authenticators and nouveau-riche collectors, many American. This new wealth exchange comes alive in Strouse’s telling; it shaped the art market as we know it.
Taste is another matter. Sargent spent (some say wasted) later years on an ornate religious mural at the Boston Public Library. Only in the past generation has he sped back to favor: with reappraisals of the young fogy’s sensuality, sexuality and opulence appearing almost yearly. Strouse’s book is firmly in that wave.
The name Wertheimer has fared less well. During the First World War, the youngest son, Ferdinand, rebranded as Bob Conway. During the Second, the youngest daughter, Ruby, died under obscure and terrible house arrest in Mussolini’s Italy. Ena tried her hand dealing modern art, briefly.
What was permanent was their parents’ bequest of their painted selves, now living at the Tate Britain. Where old money tends to pass down its art through generations, Strouse shrewdly observes, the new guard might consider an institutional gift. Security, posterity — the reasons are many. Asher’s “included patriotism,” Strouse writes, “and gratitude to a country that had provided his family with a wealth of opportunities.”
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