Family Romance

“Yes, I have always thought Sargent a great painter. He would be greater still if he had one or two things he hasn’t—but he will do.” When the novelist Henry James wrote this to his friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in the spring of 1888, John Singer Sargent had been living, like James, as an American in London for only a year. Born in Italy to American parents, the boy whose grandmother called him Fra Giovanni didn’t manage to see his parental homeland until he was 20, by which time he was living in Paris. His decision to move to London was a fated one; it was there, in his studio in Tite Street, that Sargent was to solidify his reputation as arguably the leading portraitist of his time.

Yet anyone who has ever seen a Sargent portrait in the flesh will recognize the guileless wisdom of James’ conclusion. At best they are glorious attestations of the grandeur, ostentation, and self-consciousness of the portrait genre, but there is also something off about them—the tone slightly jarring, or a strip of color mislaid, or an anomalous detail interrupting an otherwise plain background. “A portrait,” as Sargent himself would put it, “is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth.” The excellence of Sargent is in the imperfections. James’ summation of his friend, on the other hand, is perfect, and the novelist’s name appears not infrequently in Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, perhaps because Strouse is a leading authority on the James family—she wrote the definitive biography of Henry’s sister Alice—but more likely because, of all those who ever took sides for or against Sargent, none seemed to quite get him like Henry James did.

You can find Sargent’s portrait of James, executed in 1913, hanging in a room on the second story of London’s National Gallery where, if Sargent’s greatest private patron had had his way, you would also have found 10 life-size portraits depicting the members of a large, affluent Jewish family by the name of Wertheimer. That the leading portraitist of his epoch and milieu found his way into the lives of this family, that he painted them with a sympathy and a vivacity uncommon in gentile depictions of Jews from that time, that the patron himself essentialized the changing tenor of British wealth and the outsized integrationist ambitions of the rising British Jewry, and that this patron did not, finally, have his way, is the rich territory into which Jean Strouse guides her readers in this outstanding piece of narrative history.

Stanley Olson’s 1986 biography of John Singer Sargent, His Portrait, afforded barely one page to the Wertheimer family, who gave the artist, let it not be forgotten, his largest and most lucrative private patronage. This Wertheimer-sized void in the story is perhaps what Jean Strouse is referring to when, in her introduction to Family Romance, she deplores the “serious limitations” of past biographical projects on Sargent. Olson, to be fair, was aware of it too. “The Wertheimers, who must have been remarkable, have been badly served by posterity,” he wrote, serving them badly all the while. His entreaties have now been answered; the enormity of Strouse’s project cannot be understated. High-flying symbols of the Edwardian excess, the family is practically forgotten today. The most famous Wertheimers might be Pierre and Paul, the brothers whose investment enabled the enormous expansion of Chanel in the mid-1920s, and to whom Sargent’s Wertheimers are, as it turns out, unrelated.

The head of the family, Asher, was descendant of two notable Samsons. The earliest was a “court Jew”—aka court factor, aka financial adviser, aka lender—to his eminency, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I of Vienna. This Samson held so unusually powerful a position he became known as the Judenkaiser. The second Samson Wertheimer, Asher’s father, founded the family’s art-dealing interest after moving to England in the 1830s from Bavaria, only a border away from where Leopold I once ruled. Asher, in addition to the family occupation, inherited his father’s fortune; by the end of his life he had sextupled its value.

In 1897, in celebration of his and his wife Flora’s silver wedding anniversary, Asher commissioned two portraits—one of each spouse—from Sargent. Asher loved what the artist made of him; Flora did not. In any case, it was Asher’s money, and he decided to spend it on 10 more portraits at the hand of the master. There were, after all, 10 children to depict, popped out by Flora in the span of 16 years. “Philoprogenitive” was Sargent’s word for it; others would call it a rather fantastically Jewish rate of reproduction.

The commission was the largest and most lucrative Sargent ever received from a private patron, and their mutual respect and affection went to the core. Almost every Sunday, from the time of the first commission to his death in 1918, Asher took a merry jaunt from his mansion on Connaught Place to the Tite Street studio of his friend and client. Sargent, usually elusive and fairly private, displayed no such tendencies with Asher and his family, to whose exuberant personalities and gaudy extravagances he took an immediate liking (and if you had such a big-hearted and big-walleted patron, wouldn’t you too?).

The 12 portraits, executed in more or less declining order of age, took 11 years in total. They display all the hallmarks of Sargent’s careerlong fascinations. “What interested him,” writes Strouse, “was not abstract history but character, self-presentation, visual style.” Though he sometimes grumbled to friends about being trapped in a near-permanent state of “chronic Wertheimerism,” and though by the end of the series he was so totally emptied out that he resolved to more or less leave the painted portrait behind, the series provided Sargent a rich artistic opportunity. He used the encouragement of his patron and his preternatural rapport with the children as a security against which to leverage a rather exploratory approach to style. Strouse, in addition to being an accomplished researcher, is an astute reader of art history, and her analysis hints at the various aesthetic contexts which Sargent like to deploy, and subvert, in his portraits.

He seemed to try as many stylistic flourishes as there were Wertheimers to paint: Asher as a nobleman captured with an eye to high mannerism; Edward as an impressionistic mirage; the curiously striking orientalism of Almina; and something vaguely baroque, shading rococo, in the stately demeanor and pearl-draped diffidence of his two portraits of the matriarch Flora. There is just as often in Sargent a curious austerity as there is an almost sardonic sense of humor. Posed alone in a pink satin dress, leaning on an ormolu table complete with a vase of drooping flowers, the daughter Hylda looks either like a mysterious eccentric or a forlorn teen left alone by her date at the prom. The pathos is so accentuated it’s almost satirical, but Sargent is never condescending; he and the audience—and mostly, but not always, his subjects—are in on the joke.

If Strouse is generally enjoyable, if a little trite, on Sargent’s place in art history—her declaration that Sargent “has always resisted classification” sounding a lot like what every critic claims about every artist in every piece for every publication—what makes the book extraordinary is her facility with capturing a milieu, an epoch, a context, and spinning its elaboration of threads into a tapestry real enough to step into. In many ways, the world of Family Romance is the heart of it, the pivotal element that distinguishes it from a routine chronicle of artist and patron. It was a world of Rothschild scions and Vanderbilt wives who hired leading art firms and decorators to help them “improve” on Versailles. It was a world in which the Countess of Warwick, who “specialized in spending money and in the high Edwardian sport of adultery,” threw an extravagant ball to celebrate her husband’s accession to the earldom—yes, you read that all right—yet grew so horrified at its criticism by a liberal-minded journalist that she decided to convert to socialism and run for elected office.

It was a world, mannered and diamond-lined and decadent, which belonged to Asher and Sargent in equal measure that it withheld them, Asher because of his ethnicity, Sargent because of his fugacious temperament. Indeed, as high-minded and dignified as they considered themselves to be—and as they paid Sargent handsomely to portray them—the ruthless competitiveness of British aristocratic families, and their art dealers, is Family Romance’s most sharply drawn narrative thread. Two of the book’s best chapters splurge on the juicy details of this upper-class competition in a manner befitting a Jamesian short story. In one, Asher endeavors to acquire the art collection of the Hope banking family, who financed America’s purchase from France of the Louisiana Territory. He is undercut by not one, not two, but three rival dealers, who intercept his purchase under the guise of assisting him, and proceed to sell off the work from under Asher’s nose. One imagines Strouse’s awe upon learning that one of these lecherous rivals was named, remarkably, Gutekunst (“good art”). Letters fly across the Atlantic; eager buyers, hearing contradictory things from each principal, are sent into a mad panic at the prospect of missing out on the masterworks of the Hope collection. Asher is so dismayed at the craven, backstabbing, almost pathetic desperation of his fellow art dealers and their clients that he decides henceforth to no longer actively participate in estate deals, but to merely finance them.

Another somewhat less tabloidy but nonetheless soupy chapter deals with a cravenness to which Asher himself was not immune: sibling rivalry. When Samson Wertheimer died, his copious estate was split evenly between his two sons, Asher and Charles. “Wicked Uncle Charlie” as he was known at Connaught Place was, according to the picture Strouse elucidates, just as brilliant and refined of taste as his brother. But Charles, as fate would have it, possessed an intemperance and ill-discipline that the more scrupulous Asher somehow avoided. By the time most of the Wertheimer portraits had been exhibited, and to considerable acclaim too, Charles had run away from his first wife and was marrying his second. In a fit of competitive ardor, he commissioned the Irish painter William Orpen to paint him and his new wife. Orpen, tellingly, charged one-tenth of Sargent’s rate for his portrait of Charles, and even less for the wife. When Charles died in April 1911, Asher, who was convalescing in the south of France, sent an assistant to the funeral.

The mid-19th century ushered in a tumultuous period for the British nobility. An agricultural depression meant many landed families, and their fortunes, were in jeopardy. Never overly inclined to donate their collections to public institutions, the sell-off of the estate collections began. Yet as the old feudal-style wealth was in decline, a corresponding wave of new industrial wealth, eager to legitimize itself, clamoured to adopt the formal trappings of gentility and noblesse. For someone like Samson Wertheimer, positioned between the two worlds, selling the old art to the newly wealthy, it might have seemed almost too easy.

At the heart of this new plutocratic paradigm were the British Jews, who found themselves cornered at a crossroad of defiance, success, integration, and prosperity. They had to keep one foot behind them and one foot forward. When the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and early 1900s evacuated tens of thousands of Jews from their homelands, Asher and his fellow second-generation British Jews gave financial support to the incoming refugees, and sent money off to those who’d stayed behind. At the same time, these acculturated families were attending synagogues at best twice a year, anglicizing their surnames, quietly rising into the upper echelons of society. It is telling that Asher insisted on sending all four of his sons to elite schools: Oxford, Cambridge, and Harrow, the last of which had only begun “professing” Jews in 1870 because admitting children of the nouveau riche Jewry was in their unquestionable financial interest.

Art dealing, as Samson Wertheimer had correctly gambled, was an especially gainful mode of legitimizing oneself, one’s family, and one’s wealth. He was hardly the only Jew to do so. Across the 19th century, Western Europe saw a rising preeminence of Jewish art dealers. Strouse makes several guesses as to why this may have been: a historic skill for adaptability; the tradition of multilingualism, transferrable into a largely international art market; and the high value placed on education and knowledge in Jewish culture, particularly that special kind of expert knowledge that nobody else has and that people might derive some pecuniary value in accessing. The more interesting questions that Strouse fails to pose: What of the Jewish sense of taste? What, if anything, did art actually mean to them?

It seems unlikely that a man with no material interest in the notion of visual beauty would have so copiously patronized, and so eagerly befriended, the most revered portrait artist of his day. That the Jewish tradition tends to dismiss the power of aesthetics makes Asher’s position doubly interesting. If there is a failing in Family Romance, it is in the underexploration of Asher’s sense of taste, of aesthetic propriety. Not even the bequest of the family portraits, from Asher and Flora to the National Gallery in London, is analyzed through this lens. Instead, Strouse turns the bequest into merely another form of familial legitimization.

There had been an agreement made between C.H. Collins Baker of the National Gallery and Asher, as the end of his life approached, that most of the 12 Wertheimer portraits would be donated once both he and Flora had died. Asher’s only stipulation, and a remarkable one at that, was for Collins Baker to promise that they would remain on permanent display. Collins Baker said he believed he could “guarantee” that. Asher died in 1918, Flora in December 1922. A mere few days after the matriarch’s death, Collins Baker sent a direct inquiry to Asher’s lawyer asking when the portraits could be delivered. When Asher’s son Conway, an executor of the will, brought the paintings to the gallery later that month, Collins Baker reaffirmed his “guarantee.” But Asher, who had withstood his fair share of bad-faith acting among colleagues and clients—remember Gutekunst?—should have known better. When Collins Baker inevitably reneged on his promise and made plans to hand the portraits off to the Tate Gallery, Conway was furious. Collins Baker sent back a somewhat incredulous letter, stupefied that the Wertheimers could ever have imagined that any gallery would guarantee the public exhibition of a set of donated works.

The crucial question for Strouse, as with several other past researchers, is why Asher contrived his bequest and its conditions. Why didn’t he keep all the portraits in the family? Why did he make so public his desire for historic recognition? In an essay on Asher for the Jewish Museum of New York, Michelle Lapine argues it was the apotheosis of a career forged by spectacular deal-making: superimposing his outsized sense of self-importance onto the British public, inserting himself into the upper echelons of British society for all time, was his greatest deal. Strouse takes a somewhat oppositional view, arguing that it was as much about “patriotism” as it was about ensuring a rarefied legacy for him and his family.

There are other ways to interpret the bequest—as a petition to his children that they forge their own paths forward, or as an emphatic endorsement of Sargent’s peculiar type of monumental portraiture. But these seem pale and limp compared to the ultimate irony of the Wertheimer story. For however munificent or self-aggrandizing Asher’s intentions were, the gesture, in the end, wasn’t enough. The Wertheimers have been largely forgotten to us now. The portraits have, with few exceptions, been locked up in a Tate storage basement for six decades. Even the Wertheimer family line was imperiled; only three of the 10 Wertheimer children married Jews, none of whom had any children. And as the patron fell away, so too did the painter. The emergence of groups like the fauves and the Bloomsbury artists had turned Sargent into a cypher for establishment conservatism. When the legacy of late-19th- and early-20th-century modernism finally shook out, and the move to nonfiguration appeared the preeminent step toward progress, Sargent’s aristocratic faces were left behind. Indeed, when one sees the few Sargent portraits in the Met, a peek into the next room, filled with Robert Henri and the Ashcan School painters, makes Sargent seem irrevocably old hat.

It was fated that this pair, this artist-patron duo, would slip at some point into obscurity; they were such creatures of their time. But history, as it’s wont to do, moves in circles, and you wouldn’t have to stretch very far to claim that Sargent is now considered one of the most popular artists of the last 150 years. Family Romance is the second Sargent book in two years from the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux alone. His renaissance has been considerable; now Jean Strouse is rerouting some of that attention to those who made John Singer Sargent possible. Her remarkable achievement in Family Romance is the double act of illuminating in excruciating detail the rise and fall of an obscure family, and using that detail, of time and place and milieu, to unshroud the mysteries of art. Of Sargent’s painting of three of the youngest Wertheimer children, Essie, Ruby and Ferdinand, laying about in the schoolroom of the mansion on Connaught Place, a critic for The Spectator noted its “Oriental” feeling, one in which the air “smells of scent and burnt pastilles” and in which “the moral atmosphere of an opulent and exotic society has been seized and put before us.” It is doubtful if a painting can display a moral atmosphere; to do this requires someone like Strouse, a careful and critical hand, to apply her own brush to the canvas. 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.