Sargent’s Greatest Patron

Friday, October 3, 4:00 PM at the Norfolk Library

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Jean Strouse, author of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, and Susan Galassi, author of Picasso’s Variations on the Masters, talk about the relationship between the great artist and his closest patron.

At the height of his career, John Singer Sargent painted twelve portraits of one English family. The man who commissioned the paintings was Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent who became the artist’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 dignitaries painted by earlier masters. The story travels back through hundreds of years to Habsburg Vienna and forward to fascist Italy. Strouse and Galassi discuss the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding the portraits, and look at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

Jean Strouse is the prize-winning 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 elsewhere. Strouse has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as the director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Susan Galassi is Curator Emerita of The Frick Collection and a noted expert on Picasso, Whistler, Goya, Monet, and other artists. She is the author of Picasso’s Variations on the Masters and co-author of Goya’s Last Works, among other publications.

“Vivid social portraiture . . . Family Romance, a book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes, tells a story that is both specific and universal—about the yearnings for recognition and the tenuous rewards of achieving it.”

—Benjamin Balint, The Wall Street Journal

“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