Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers

"I love this book! Jean Strouse is such a superb writer and she has won several prizes for her biographies of the American financier J.P. Morgan and Alice James , Henry James’s sister. So she’s super familiar with the territory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which enabled her to create this beautiful background, then plug her characters in. Sargent was a portrait painter, as most people know, and he painted people who were famous or rich or prominent in some other way, like politics, art and literature. The book is a window into this world of wealthy, entitled people around the turn of the last century. The Wertheimers, who are the main subject of this book, were kind of outliers in that world because they were Jewish. The first Wertheimer who emigrated from Bavaria to England made a real fortune, first by creating copies of rare antiques, and then by selling rare antiques himself. Then his son, Asher, became a big-time art dealer. The portraits that Sargent did, nine from this one family, all ended up in the National Gallery. Now they are at Tate Britain. The portraits are just amazing. Everyone from Asher to his beautiful, rich, long-suffering wife. And the portraits of the children are fantastic too, especially the daughters, who were very exuberant people who had the means to live life at its fullest. There was also a lot of tragedy because they—the kids, especially—had perhaps too much money, and suffered from what can happen to the next generation of wealth, often through a lack of focus or purpose. Some died early by drug overdose, or in wartime. One who went to Italy ended up under house arrest under Mussolini and didn’t come to a good end. Strouse creates both a vanished world and these wonderful characters who lived in it. And it’s a look at painting and art as Sargent practiced it. I love reading about all these things, so I loved this book."