Family Romance

Description

The friendship behind the masterpieces. John Singer Sargent — the most sought-after portraitist of his age — painted the Wertheimer family again and again, an extraordinary run of canvases unlike anything else in his career. In Family Romance, Bancroft Prize-winning biographer Jean Strouse unravels the story behind them: the deep, complicated bond between Sargent and Asher Wertheimer, the London art dealer who became his friend, patron, and most devoted sitter.

Published in 2024, this is biography as detective work. Strouse — acclaimed for her lives of J.P. Morgan and Alice James — reconstructs a vanished world of Edwardian London: the Wertheimers’ glittering household, the Jewish milieu Sargent rarely painted, and the dramas and mysteries surrounding the family. Why did Sargent, who guarded his privacy so fiercely, give these portraits to the nation?

Rich with new research and illustrated with the paintings themselves, Family Romance is about friendship across boundaries — and about what portraits reveal and conceal. Essential for lovers of Sargent, art history, and biography at its most elegant.

John Singer Sargent painted the Wertheimer family again and again — an extraordinary run of portraits by the most sought-after artist of his age. In Family Romance, Bancroft Prize-winning biographer Jean Strouse tells the story behind those canvases: the deep, complicated bond between Sargent and Asher Wertheimer, the London art dealer who became his friend, patron, and most devoted sitter.

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Published in 2024, this is biography as detective work. Strouse — acclaimed for her lives of J.P. Morgan and Alice James — reconstructs a vanished world of Edwardian London: the Wertheimers’ glittering household, the Jewish milieu Sargent rarely painted, and the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies that surrounded the family. Why did Sargent, who guarded his privacy so fiercely, give these portraits to the nation? What did the Wertheimers mean to him?

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Rich with new research and illustrated with the paintings themselves, Family Romance is both an art book and a human story — about friendship across boundaries, about what portraits reveal and conceal, and about one artist’s most personal commission. For lovers of Sargent, of art history, or of biography at its most elegant, this is an essential addition to the shelf.

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