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.
Noted biographer Jean Strouse has won the Bancroft Prize and received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts. Her work has appeared in major magazines including The New Yorker and Newsweek. In Morgan, she creates the first complete portrait of a man who defined American commerce and banking. Contemporaries described J. Pierpoint Morgan as "the financial Moses of the New World." He was also called "a beefy, red-faced, thick-necked financial bully, drunk with wealth and power ."
To separate the legend from the man, Jean Strouse uses a wealth of uncataloged biographical documents from the Pierpoint Morgan Library. She shows J.Pierpoint Morgan in the full context of his childhood and health, travels and tastes, personal affairs and business relationships. Through Nelson Runger's thoughtful narration, this accessible biography becomes a fascinating audio production. Morgan sheds light on the life of a remarkable man, but it also helps us better understand today's international finance.
