A glittering account of John Singer Sargent’s relationship with an eminent Edwardian family.
In Family Romance, Jean Strouse tells the story of John Singer Sargent and his relationship with the Wertheimer family, structured around the twelve portraits he painted of them between 1898 and 1908.
Asher Wertheimer was a London art dealer of German-Jewish descent. A prominent figure of the Edwardian age, he was at ease among Rothschilds, royals, journalists and aristocrats. In commissioning Sargent to paint a series of portraits of his family, he became the American expatriate artist’s most important patron, as well as a close personal friend.
Recreating the world of turn-of-the-century London, Strouse gives a dramatic account of these extraordinary lives, a tale that encompasses intrigue, tragedy and resounding success. At the same time she traces the decline of the British aristocracy and the rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, a transformation that Sargent captured brilliantly in his art.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781526188564
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 843 g
Dimensions: 234 x 156 x 29 mm
Longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award 'A deeply informed, acutely sensitive cultural history.'Kirkus Reviews, one of their Best Arts Books of 2024'A nuanced portrait of a world in flux.'Publishers Weekly'I read and shivered and tried, unsuccessfully, to think of other sub-three-hundred-page works of nonfiction that deserve to be called epic.’Jackson Arn, The New Yorker'A book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes, tells a story both specific and universal - about the yearnings for recognition and the tenuous rewards of achieving it.'Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal'Strouse confronts prejudice unblinkingly but with a historian’s grace'Walker Mimms, The New York Times'Yet Strouse’s account of their relation is not simply a chronicle of artistic patronage. As the title of Family Romance implies, something like friendship, too, was in the air when Sargent painted the Wertheimers.'Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The New York Review of Books'Family Romance is beautifully and generously illustrated'The Boston Globe'[Jean Strouse’s] 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 [...] 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.'Tablet‘A riveting book about an amazing vanished world, a remarkable family and a great and mysterious artist, told with energy and vividness and sharp humour, full of extraordinary characters, some dubious, some shocking, some tragic, and sweeping with speed and brio over a great arc of time. No one could tell this story better, and what a story it is!’Hermione Lee, author of Virginia Woolf‘Jean Strouse, a first-rate biographer, has fought through Sargent’s hieroglyphic handwriting to boost our knowledge of the his unusual friendship with the extraordinary Wertheimer family. In uncovering more of this artistic Jewish family’s history, Strouse has pursued a riveting detective story reminiscent of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes, revealing fascinating and colourful histories and characters previously little known. Strouse’s Family Romance is a great read for anyone who loves Sargent and the glittering social circles in which he voyaged.’Paul Fisher, author of The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent and His World'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. Jean Strouse is one of our subtlest biographers, and she shares John Singer Sargent’s eye for the exquisitely telling detail that illuminates not only a character but an age.'Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette'A society in transition, an elusive painter in his prime and an Anglo-Jewish dynasty with aristocratic habits: all the elements are here for a rich drama. Jean Strouse delivers, prismatically pairing art and life, illuminating corners of brilliant privilege and dark prejudice, inviting us to peer, over John Singer Sargent's shoulder, into Gilded Age drawing rooms. Stylish, sumptuous and a joy to read.'Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams'In recounting each sitter’s story, Strouse reveals both charming details and terrible tragedies. The book is particularly interesting for its examination of the ways in which portraiture was used to establish an identity for this upper-middle class Jewish family of German descent that had only one generation previously settled in England.'Jo Lawson-Tancred, Artnet - .
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