In Family Romance, biographer Jean Strouse traces the relationship between John Singer Sargent and a large British Jewish family at the turn of the 20th century.
How did this project take shape?
In 2001, I was doing some work in Seattle and there was an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s portraits of one family. The father was an art dealer in London of German Jewish descent—his name was Asher Wertheimer—and he commissioned Sargent to paint 12 portraits, one of each family member, and it turned out to be the largest commission Sargent ever had. I’d always associated Sargent with portraits of British aristocrats and wealthy Americans—not with paintings of Jews—so I was quite intrigued by these paintings, by Sargent and this family, and I had a million questions: How did they meet? How did they become friends? Did they keep seeing each other after he was done working on them? And the answer was yes—they became very good friends—Sargent with Asher, his wife Flora, and their 10 children.
Can you talk about the portraits’ reception and how they reflected the time period and its attitudes about Jewish people?
This period—roughly, the 1880s to 1920s in London—was one of dramatic social change: the old, aristocratic British class was declining in terms of power and status and income, and new people on both sides of the Atlantic were moving into great wealth and positions of power. Jews were among them. Asher’s father had been extremely successful as an art dealer as was Asher himself, and he, his brother, and other Jews in England became very socially prominent. But in Britain and America, in some ways, Jews were never going be “on the inside” of society. The response to these paintings made it clear how alien Jews looked to the Anglo-Saxon world—even critics who loved these paintings referred to the subjects as Oriental-looking, alien, not “like us.”
You write that John Singer Sargent was also in some ways an outsider. Can you say more about that?
He was an American and continued his whole life to identify as American. But his parents left Philadelphia after their first child died at the age of two, and went to Europe and never came back, so Sargent was actually born in Florence. The family traveled all over Europe throughout Sargent’s childhood and early adulthood, and he didn’t set foot in America until he was 20, before eventually settling in London in the 1880s. So he was American, not married, and gay—he also was never going to truly part of British society. And, just like Henry James—who was a good friend of his and lived near him in London—he was an acute social observer. It was a powerful vantage point to not be entirely inside the culture you’re living within.
