Family Romance bookcover

Family Romance

John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

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.

Product Details

PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Publish DateNovember 19, 2024
Pages336
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9780374615673
Dimensions237.5 X 163.8 X 27.9 mm | 1.4 pounds

About the Author

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier, Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimeres. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Newsweek. Strouse has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Family Romance [is] Jean Strouse’s brisk, wise and admiring survey of an unusually long client relationship that signaled a tenuous shift in British society . . . Strouse confronts prejudice unblinkingly but with a historian’s grace for evolving mores . . ." —Walker Mimms, The New York Times

“Acidly delightful . . . Strouse has an astute eye for the era’s swerves and twists . . . I read and shivered and tried, unsuccessfully, to think of other sub-three-hundred-page works of nonfiction that deserve to be called epic.” —Jackson Arn, The New Yorker

" “The history of art is a history of commerce . . . Jean Strouse delicately and thoroughly traces one such exchange . . . absorbing" —Charles Finch, The Boston Globe

“[An] outstanding piece of narrative history . . . Family Romance is a book that not only gives the Wertheimers their due, but helps to finish painting the picture of them that the master portraitist of their gilded age had left so tantalizingly incomplete." —Eloy Rosenberg, Tablet

"An absorbing story . . . . one ends it very grateful to have learned about this extraordinary and engaging family and the important part it played in Sargent's life and career." —Peter Parker, TLS

"A riveting book about an amazing vanished world, a remarkable family and a great and mysterious artist, told with energy and vividness and sharp humor, full of extraordinary characters, some dubious, some shocking, some tragic, and sweeping with speed and brio over a great arc of time. No one could tell this story better, and what a story it is!" —Hermione Lee

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate