All paintings by John Singer Sargent: Asher Wertheimer, 1898 (left) and Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905 (center) © Tate, London. Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer, 1898 (right) courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art. Museum purchase in memory of William H. Henderson
Discussed in this essay:
Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20.
Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32.
In 2001, the biographer Jean Strouse happened upon an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent that featured twelve portraits of the Wertheimers, a British family of German-Jewish descent. Asher Wertheimer, the patriarch, was a well-known art dealer who had commissioned Sargent to paint a series of portraits of himself and his wife in 1897 to commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary. Over the next decade, as the artist painted the couple and their ten children—individually and in groups, sometimes more than once—he evidently got to know the family well. A photograph on display alongside the portraits showed him playing croquet with two of the Wertheimers on the lawn of their country house.
At the sight of the portraits, Strouse was “entirely captivated,” she writes in her introduction to Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers. It’s a type of coup de foudre that might be unique to biographers, who must be prepared to devote years, if not decades, to their subjects. As Strouse wandered the gallery, her mind filled with questions. Who were the members of this family, whose portraits represented them as both “distinctively Jewish” and members of London’s upper class, surrounded by items that testified to their luxurious lifestyle? What were their lives like in a society that perceived Jews as irremediably “other,” regardless of their wealth and education? And how had Sargent, an American expat and “cosmopolitan nomad,” come to paint them?
But perhaps Strouse’s most important question, at least in the context of the project upon which she felt drawn to undertake, was a practical one: Was there enough material here for a book? Her two previous biographies had drawn on significant archives. Her debut was a life of Alice James, the invalid sister of novelist Henry and philosopher William, whose accomplishments were undistinguished but in whom Strouse found an exemplar of others of her class and station: women with ambition and intelligence who had few options outside the domestic sphere. Quiet, nuanced, and probing, Alice James became an instant classic upon its publication in 1980, and it has been an inspiration to feminist scholars ever since. (The book was reissued last month by Picador.)
Some biographers stick with the same time period or intellectual world, choosing a future subject from the circle that surrounds a previous one. For her second book, Strouse has said, she wanted “a complete change.” She found it in the life of the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, whose papers, still uncatalogued, were waiting for her at the Morgan Library in Manhattan. Here the challenge was quite different. Strouse didn’t need to make a case for the significance of her subject; Morgan’s myth was already larger than life. The image of him as a cynical, rapacious tycoon who had single-handedly shaped the American economy around his own whims was well established.
In describing her approach, Strouse once quoted Lytton Strachey, the author of four brief, novella-like biographies collected in the volume Eminent Victorians. He advised the biographer not to attack a subject directly but to “shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.” The biographer must “row out over that great ocean of material,” Strachey continues,
and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.
Strouse, lowering her bucket into the Morgan archives, came up with something so different from the standard view of Morgan that she initially had trouble recognizing it: a sensitive and mercurial man devoted to his longtime mistresses (if not to his wife) and to collecting art, with the larger aim of benefiting the public—both through his business decisions and by bringing as much of Europe’s cultural holdings as possible to American soil. She summons all her skills in Morgan: American Financier, her nearly eight-hundred-page chronicle of this fascinating, elusive, brilliant man, exemplifying the radical empathy of the biographer, who must be at once historian, psychologist, and nonfiction novelist. Indeed, the generosity of spirit required to excel at this genre may ask even more from the biographer than fiction does of the novelist, since the former is bound by the strictures of fact.
Now, two and a half decades after the publication of Morgan—during which time she won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and served as the director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she mentored many would-be biographers, myself included—Strouse has again chosen something entirely different. Her latest work is a kind of quest, in which Strouse pieces together a fragmented narrative from letters and documents that sometimes appear verbatim. Family Romance is a group portrait of Sargent and his twelve sitters, intertwining the artist’s life story with the details she has unearthed about the more elusive Wertheimers, set against the backdrop of upper-class Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. “More than a group of family portraits . . . they illustrate an epoch,” one critic wrote of Sargent’s Wertheimer paintings in 1923, when they were first displayed at the National Gallery in London. It was an epoch that saw massive changes in the international art market as well as in British society—albeit not in the prejudice of Britons against the Jews who were increasingly making a home in their country.
When Strouse next encountered the Wertheimer portraits, she had a private viewing under unusual circumstances. Since they had been removed from the gallery that once featured them, the paintings were stored in racks in the Tate’s off-site warehouse, located in a guarded compound in London’s East End. She had to contort herself—bending her head to the side or climbing a scaffolding ladder—in order to look at them. Still, she spent three hours in rapturous contemplation. Asher Wertheimer is depicted “holding his coat open in an expansive gesture,” his expression “self-possessed and astute.” Flora, his wife, wears a choker of pearls apparently made with “single taps of Sargent’s brush”; Strouse recognized her chair from the living room of Asher and Flora’s granddaughter-in-law, whom she had been interviewing. Ena and Betty, the Wertheimers’ older daughters, are posed in the drawing room in evening gowns, looking as if they are “about to step out of the picture into the night. . . . The rustle of satin skirts is practically audible.”
Sargent spent a decade creating the twelve Wertheimer portraits. Strouse begins her story earlier, with the emigration of Samson Wertheimer, Asher’s father, from the Bavarian town of Fürth to England in 1839. By 1854, he was a naturalized British citizen with a royal warrant as a dealer in china and antiques, as well as a cabinetmaker of such skill that he later received a commission from the Duke of Edinburgh. As Strouse points out, selling art was a profession to which Jews were uniquely suited. Coming from communities all over the world, many of them spoke multiple languages, including Yiddish or Ladino, both a type of lingua franca that allowed them to communicate with other Jews of different nationalities. “Yesterday they were scrap mongers,” the French novelist and critic Edmond de Goncourt wrote in 1877. “Today they are gentlemen dressed by our tailors who buy and read books and have wives as distinguished as the wives in our own circles.”
In 1897, when Sargent began work on their portraits, Asher and Flora Wertheimer were living alongside titled aristocrats and other wealthy Jews on one of London’s most exclusive streets; their neighbors included the Churchills, whose son Winston was the same age as their daughter Ena. The Wertheimer sons attended elite schools: Harrow, Cambridge, Oxford. Aside from their synagogue wedding and a philanthropic contribution to a fund supporting Jews in Russia who were victims of pogroms, Strouse finds only a little evidence of their Jewish affiliation. Instead, like other Jews of their class, they sought primarily to emphasize their Britishness. In 1887, for instance, an exhibition of some three thousand objects attesting to the history of Jews in Britain was staged to honor Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, “emphasizing at once their identification with the nation and their distinct place within it,” Strouse writes.
Despite such efforts, Jews like the Wertheimers were persistently viewed as separate from mainstream European society, regardless of their talent or their wealth—as Goncourt’s lines all too clearly demonstrate. When Asher’s portrait first went on display at the Royal Academy in 1898, critics responded above all to his Jewishness. “Portraits have historically been markers of privilege—the province of royalty, nobility, leading figures in the military, politics, religion,” Strouse writes. “And from the outset, the Old Masterly portrayal of a middle-class businessman with distinctively Jewish features aroused antipathy.” A cartoon in Punch poked fun at his nose, his paunch, and his dog—a large black poodle that Sargent painted with its mouth wide open and its tongue lolling out. The American architect I. N. Phelps Stokes commented that Asher appeared to be “pleasantly engaged in counting golden shekels.” A few years later, the critic Christian Brinton described Sargent’s subjects thus: “To-day comes a savant, a captain of industry, or a slender, troubled child. Tomorrow it will be an insinuating Semitic Plutus”—the Greek god of wealth.
Sargent’s portraits of the women of the family were no less controversial. He painted Ena Wertheimer—six feet tall, with long dark hair and a voluptuous figure—twice. In the first portrait, she stands next to her sister Betty, who is nearly as tall. Both women wear low-cut gowns that expose an expanse of creamy white skin; they face the viewer boldly, with Ena’s hand open in an inviting gesture. In the second, done on the occasion of Ena’s marriage to Robert Mathias, a Jewish businessman from Germany, she wears a long ceremonial robe that had been left in Sargent’s studio by the Duke of Marlborough, whom the artist was also painting at the time. A broomstick pokes out from beneath the robe like a sword; her illuminated face glances back over her shoulder at the viewer. Sargent subtitled the painting A Vele Gonfie, “in full sail.” Critics found the depiction of Ena and Betty overly sexualized, even if the two women were “splendid types of their race,” as one put it. Ena’s solo portrait was praised for its “extraordinary animation” but also invited condemnation—of Ena’s androgyny rather than her ethnicity.
Strouse’s feeling for these portraits is evident in her passionate descriptions of her encounters with them. As a connoisseur of art, she admires Sargent’s technique, marveling at the tiny quantities of all the pigments found in the “incandescent white” of Ena’s gown or the expression in Asher’s eyes. But more than that, the pictures look “familiar” to her, in the deeper sense of the word: in their faces, she recognizes her own Jewish ancestors, who immigrated to America from southern Germany around the same time that Samson Wertheimer left for England.
Reading Strouse’s book, I couldn’t resist looking up images of the portraits. At the sight of Asher Wertheimer, I felt my heart rise into my mouth. There is no denying the portrait’s masterful composition and technique. But on my first viewing, I could think only of the ways in which it recalls the grossest Jewish caricatures—particularly the panting, grinning dog, which seems a provocative, not to say gratuitous, touch. As I kept looking, though, I felt less and less certain of what I was meant to see in the picture. Are Asher’s hooded eyes and large nose an anti-Semitic trope or a lovingly accurate representation of a middle-aged patriarch? Do his partial smile and half-open hand—the same gesture his daughter Ena makes in her portrait with her sister—suggest greed or hospitality? “Great portraits lend themselves to multiple interpretations, and this one is a powerful case in point,” Strouse concludes.
Asher Wertheimer embraced his own portrait. He left nine of the Wertheimer paintings to the National Gallery on the condition that they be displayed together. When the House of Commons debated whether to honor his wishes, in 1923, one member of Parliament suggested that the “clever, but extremely repulsive, pictures should be placed in a special chamber of horrors.” Over the objections of the surviving Wertheimers, the paintings were moved to the Tate Gallery in 1926. Most of them went into storage in the Sixties, when interest in Sargent was at a low ebb.
What were Sargent’s motives for depicting the Wertheimers in this way? Strouse points out that he was often attracted to subjects from other cultures, such as a flamenco dancer featured in a major work given to Isabella Stewart Gardner for her museum in Boston, which remains one of his most famous paintings. “A large Jewish family offered an attractively modern, dynamic subject—a rich opportunity to capture personal and social change,” as well as one to try out new painting techniques in search of a “fresh visual language,” Strouse argues. Sargent was such a frequent guest at the Wertheimer home in London that the family nicknamed the dining room, where the portraits were hung, “Sargent’s mess.” Once, he brought Claude Monet to dine there, who described the company as “nothing but Jews, or almost . . . a really extravagant, crazy place.”
All paintings by John Singer Sargent: Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie, 1905; Study of Mme Gautreau, c. 1884; and Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer, 1908. All artworks © Tate, London
Sargent seems to have had a particularly warm friendship with Ena, evidenced by the tenderness with which he painted her as well as by their correspondence. In one letter, the artist promises to “crawl in on all fours straight to” her, should he manage to make it to a party to which they were invited. He was also close with Alfred, Asher and Flora’s second son, who left Cambridge without a degree to find work as a chemist but hoped, to his father’s chagrin, to become an actor. Sargent tried to mediate between them, without success. His portrait of Alfred depicts the young man with chemical flasks in the background, but Alfred’s “striking looks and impeccable clothes seem more suited to the stage than a lab,” Strouse argues. Some critics judged Alfred’s portrait one of Sargent’s greatest. “The immaculate young Jew is probably the best dressed sport in England,” one wrote.
Sargent, too, was an outsider in Britain. Born in 1856 in Italy to itinerant American parents who traveled around Europe in search of a cure for his mother’s ill health, Sargent later studied art in Paris. He never married and left no evidence of any sexual relationships, but he seems to have been attracted to men. One of his most striking paintings is a male nude of Thomas E. McKeller, a young black man who worked as an elevator operator in the Boston hotel where Sargent lived from 1916 to 1918.
While admirers judged him an heir to Velázquez, Manet, and other great portrait painters, others found his works derivative and overly stylized. He allegedly said that he lost a friend every time he made a portrait; not a few of his subjects were unhappy with the works they inspired. One was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, who seems to have been a kind of nineteenth-century influencer, a “professional beauty” famous for being famous. Sargent painted her without a commission in 1884. Strouse writes:
A foreign-born social climber, self-promoter, reputed sexual adventurer, she—her image—seemed to represent all the invasive forces threatening the social order of fin-de-siècle France.
Both she and her mother begged him to take the portrait down, saying that “all Paris mocks her”; the painting is now known as Madame X. Some of his subjects even damaged or destroyed their portraits.
When the relative of another subject complained about the way he had painted her mouth, Sargent embraced the criticism as an artistic credo. “A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!” he crowed in response. He seems to have chafed at the notion that he was a superficial painter, thanking one fan by writing, “Very few writers give me credit for insides so to speak.” This reputation fluctuated over the years: An artist in a story by P. G. Wodehouse, having accidentally depicted a child as uglier than he intended to, realizes that he’s “worked that stunt that Sargent used to pull—painting the soul of the sitter.” Time magazine called his Wertheimer portraits “extremely unflattering” and “scrupulously accurate.”
Aside from Asher’s, none of the Wertheimer portraits seems particularly unflattering. But they do accentuate their subjects’ Jewishness in a potentially inflammatory way. A portrait of three of the younger children depicts them in a darkened schoolroom that “could be an opium den in Tangier,” Strouse writes. A critic for The Spectator praised the “Oriental” aura of the portrait, imagining the air redolent of “burnt pastilles,” noting that the moral atmosphere of an opulent and exotic society has been seized and put before us.” The figures are posed “like odalisques in a harem” and “sprinkled over with dogs,” another wrote. In a final portrait of Almina, one of the younger daughters, she plays the role of the slave in Ingres’s Odalisque with Slave, holding an instrument and wearing a turban. Strouse views this representation as ironic: “an ‘Oriental’ Jewess posing as a harem slave in Oriental costume.”
Strouse suggests that Sargent’s provocative depiction of the Wertheimers may have been intended as a political statement. He presented Asher’s portrait alongside the portrait of another Jewish subject at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, which took place at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1903, the British government proposed restrictions on “undesirable” immigrants. The following year, as Sargent painted Ena costumed as a knight, a proposed Aliens Act to control immigration was hotly debated in Parliament and the British media; it passed in 1905. As Strouse points out, the act was blatantly anti-Semitic, since the only “aliens” immigrating to Britain in large numbers were Jews from Eastern Europe. A Punch cartoon from the time depicts Sargent and Velázquez strolling arm in arm past the National Gallery, with the caption desirable aliens. But if there is evidence for his political motivations, Strouse doesn’t mention it.
Like the portraits themselves, Strouse writes,
the stories of Sargent and the Wertheimers are suffused with light and shade—with incandescent talent, singular beauty, glittering friendships, wealth, secrets, conflict, bigotry, loss, early death.
Starting in the early 1900s, the family was rocked by tragedy upon tragedy. Within four months of each other, Edward, the eldest son, died of typhoid while on his honeymoon in Paris, and Alfred, the aspiring actor, died of a morphine overdose in South Africa. (Strouse speculates that Alfred’s life story inspired W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Alien Corn,” in which the son of an Anglo-Jewish patriarch commits suicide after being judged insufficiently talented to become a concert pianist.) Ruby, the youngest daughter, moved to Italy in 1925 and became involved with a younger man who belonged to the Fascist Party. When foreign Jews were ordered to leave by March 1939, she stayed behind, perhaps expecting him to protect her. Instead, she was briefly imprisoned in an Italian concentration camp. She died in 1941 of diabetic gangrene.
While working on her life of Alice James, Strouse moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to conduct research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where the James family papers are housed. One day, realizing that it was the eve of Alice’s birthday, she decided to visit her subject’s grave. “It seemed like sort of a lark, almost a joke—what you’re supposed to do when you’re writing a biography,” she said later. She bought a bouquet of daisies and took them to Cambridge Cemetery. Placing the flowers on Alice’s grave, she found herself moved to tears. “I heard myself say, internally, to Alice: ‘Don’t worry—I’ll take care of you,’ ” Strouse recalled.
“There is no greater work of art than a great portrait,” Alice James’s brother Henry wrote of Sargent in an essay that appeared in this magazine in 1887. One could say the same of biography, which is its own kind of portrait. Contemporary biographies are often touted for their discoveries: previously unseen letters, sources who haven’t before been interviewed, unpublished manuscripts. Less recognized—but equally important—is the gift of looking at what’s already there in a new way. The story of the James family had previously been told by multiple biographers, including the venerable Leon Edel, author of a five-volume life of Henry James. But Strouse, by focusing on Alice, managed to find an original path through this well-trodden territory.
If a portrait is a picture with “something wrong about the mouth,” the best biographies also make virtues out of their limitations. The greatest challenges with the story of Sargent and the Wertheimers, as Strouse openly acknowledges, are the many gaps—and outright mistakes—in the historical record. Sometimes her bucket, lowered into the ocean of the past, comes up only half full. Her diligent research, combined with her powers of deduction, allows her to compensate for much of this. Still, mysteries remain, particularly regarding Alfred’s possible suicide in Johannesburg. A note in the burial register identifies him as a “friend of H. Freeman Cohen,” whom Strouse identifies as Harry Freeman Cohen, a married man with four children who committed suicide in Johannesburg just over a year after Alfred’s death. “It is impossible to know whether there was any connection between these untimely self-inflicted deaths,” she comments laconically.
Elsewhere, Strouse has written that “every age gets the biographies it deserves . . . the questions we ask about the past reflect our present ideas and concerns.” Our current age of oversharing has seen a trend toward hybrid narratives that combine biography and memoir, allowing the biographer to claim her own place in the text, in dialogue with the subject. This isn’t new, of course—the first example of it might be A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, an “experiment in biography” published in 1934 in which the author traces the vicissitudes of his research alongside the checkered life of his little-known subject, a writer who went by the name Baron Corvo. In her introduction to Family Romance, Strouse offers the reader a tantalizing glimpse into her process, from her private viewing of the Wertheimer portraits to an auction at which she buys a file of Sargent’s letters from a collector who previously enlisted her help in deciphering them. I kept hoping she might draw the curtain back again in her later chapters. How did she discover the connection between Alfred and Harry Freeman Cohen? How did she learn that Joan Cecily Young, Conway’s wife, “apparently discarded” much of the Wertheimer family archive? There must be a story there—one I would love to read.
More than anything else, though, I wanted to know how Strouse reconciled her own reading of Asher Wertheimer and the other portraits with the mud slung at them by anti-Semitic critics. She notes that Asher’s “wet red lips,” coupled with the dog’s tongue, “could summon the trope of carnal appetite long attributed to the Jew,” and that Flora’s lavish dress “could read as Jewish excess,” but concludes only that if Sargent was anti-Semitic, “consciously or not,” his prejudice was “minimal.” Yet it matters to our reading of the portraits whether their creator was mocking his subjects or celebrating them. The fact that we cannot tell is just as disconcerting today as it must have been in Asher’s time.
As the critic Susie Linfield writes in an essay on What Does a Jew Look Like?, a book of photographs recently published in Britain, Jews remain a “minuscule minority” there, numbering some three hundred thousand out of a population of sixty-seven million. Still, visibility for Jews, now just as much as in Asher Wertheimer’s day, “can create, among the larger population, confusion, discomfort, suspicion, and resentment.” The question of what a Jew looks like is “sometimes posed as a matter of aesthetics, but it is always fundamentally political,” Linfield argues. So, too, are the unusual portraits around which Strouse has crafted this beguiling and absorbing book.
