Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
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.
0 Response to "Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers"
Post a Comment