In this public talk, Jean Strouse discusses her acclaimed new book, Family Romance, John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers with Professor Dame Hermione Lee.
About Family Romance:
In Family Romance, Bancroft Prize winning author, Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent’s portraits of the Wertheimer family
Stouse 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 London’s National Gallery, 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.
Speaker Details:
Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Newsweek, and other publications. Strouse has been a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and served as the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. She lives in New York City.
Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008, she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023 she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW at Wolfson College in 2011. She is currently working on a biography of Anita Brookner.
Further Details and Contacts:
After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception and book sale by Caper (@caperoxford).
This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended.
This is an in-person event, but will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website.
Registration will close at 10:30 on 13 May 2025.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
