Jean Strouse is the author of the new book Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers. Her other books include Morgan: American Financier. She lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write Family Romance?
A: In 2001 I was doing some work in Seattle and went to see an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the Seattle Art Museum. I had always liked the artist’s work, and he had played cameo roles in two biographies I had written, one of Alice James (the younger sister of Wiliam and Henry James), the other of the banker J. Pierpont Morgan.
The exhibition in Seattle was called John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family. I had never heard of the Wertheimers, but learned at the exhibition that the father of the family, Asher Wertheimer, was a prominent London art dealer of German Jewish descent.
In 1897 he had commissioned Sargent to do portraits of himself and his wife for their silver wedding anniversary; in the process, artist and subject became good friends, and Sargent went on to paint portraits of the couple’s 10 children as well. It was the largest commission he ever received, which made Asher his greatest private patron.
Working on this series between 1897 and 1908, Sargent mock-complained to a friend of being in a state of “chronic Wertheimerism.” Asher, for his part, said he regretted there were not more Wertheimers for Sargent to paint.
In addition to the 12 portraits, the exhibition in Seattle showed other Sargent paintings and drawings, a Wertheimer genealogy, and several photographs. In one of the photos, Sargent and two of the Wertheimers have paused during a game of croquet on the lawn of a country house. Apparently, the artist was a frequent guest at Asher’s London townhouse and his country retreat in Berkshire.
Within a few minutes, I was entirely captivated – by the paintings, a sense of the stories they might tell, and a great many questions.
What had drawn Sargent to this family? How had they met? I associated him with portraits of British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins, not with Jews. Did he have other Jewish patrons and friends? Why was the painting of the eldest son unfinished? Sargent had inscribed a pencil sketch he did of the eldest Wertheimer daughter, Ena (Helena), in 1910, “to Ena, philoprocree.” What did philoprocree mean?
The Wertheimers’ faces, in these portraits and photographs, looked distinctively Jewish and, to me, familiar. One of the wall texts said that Asher’s father, Samson, had emigrated in the 1830s from Bavaria to England, where he started the family art-dealing business. My own Jewish ancestors had left Bavaria for America at about the same time.
In 2001 I wasn’t looking to write a new book – my biography of Morgan had been published in 1999 – but I bought the exhibition catalogue, went home to New York, took a demanding full-time job, and continued to think about Sargent and the Wertheimers.
Eventually I found some of the Wertheimers’ descendants, got in touch with leading Sargent experts, and decided to try to write about these paintings, the artist, the subjects, and their social and cultural worlds.
Q: The writer Judith Thurman said of the book, “Family Romance belongs to that august line of panoramic social histories with Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, and, as the chronicle of an aristocracy in decline, with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.” What do you think of those comparisons?
A: I’m immensely flattered, of course!
I had read The Hare with Amber Eyes before I started working on this project, and read it again as I got underway. It is a brilliant book, and a model for writing about a family and art – although I cannot claim to have come anywhere near de Waal’s superlative standard!
And of course, his story of the Ephrussi family and its collection of netsuke is completely different from the story of Sargent and the Wertheimer paintings. Still, the comparison is high praise indeed.
Waugh’s Brideshead is a different kind of extraordinary standard. I have not reread it recently, but it remains indelible – as does the British television series (1981) starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Of course I read everything I could find by and about Sargent, and went to see as many of his paintings as I could. He was a wonderful friend and a very witty writer – I tracked down many of his letters, especially from the period during which he was working on the Wertheimer paintings.
Asher left eight of the portraits to England’s National Gallery – that’s a long story. They ended up at Tate Britain (originally, the National Gallery for British Art), and have spent most of the past century in a London storage facility. I went to see them there, which was quite an adventure!
There seemed to be very little documentary evidence about the Wertheimers themselves, who were not especially famous: the records of the art-dealing firms had been lost or destroyed, and there was no archive of personal letters and papers.
Still, I eventually got in touch with a number of Wertheimer descendants, who did have some documents, letters, photographs, family stories.
The very best resource was an American woman who had married into the family. She was in her 90s when I met her, and had a great many stories, memories, and papers. She could identify people in photographs, remembered countless details, and was just a wonderful, generous person. She lived in rural Kent, in England, and I went to see her every time I went to England, which was fairly often during those years.
Some of the surprising things in this saga had to do with the brilliant social and cultural worlds inhabited by its main characters: friendships with Monet, Diaghilev, Ottoline Morrell, various Rothschilds and Sassoons. Picasso once had dinner at the Wertheimer house in London, as did Monet.
Other surprises were tragedies: Asher’s two eldest sons died in their 20s; his youngest daughter ended up in fascist Italy in the 1930s, and died there in 1941.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I had been thinking of calling it Portrait of a Family, which would have echoes of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My wonderful editor, Jonathan Galassi, didn’t love that.
Someone else had suggested A Fine Romance, which wasn’t right, but Jonathan and I both liked the idea of having Romance in the title, as it suggested the nature of the Sargent-Wertheimer friendships – and together we came up with Family Romance.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m still doing talks about this book – going to England next week; also writing some book reviews. Thinking about thinking about a new book project.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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