The Patron Subjects

On a visit to Seattle early in 2001, I happened to see an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the Seattle Art Museum. The artist had made brief appearances in two biographies I had written—one, of Alice James, the younger sister of William and Henry James; the other, of the financier and art collector J. Pierpont Morgan. My publisher had reproduced part of a Sargent painting, The Breakfast Table, on a paperback edition of Alice James. All these figures—Sargent, Morgan, the Jameses—were Americans who lived transatlantic lives between the 1850s and early 1900s, and their worlds occasionally intersected. Sargent and Henry James were neighbors in London and good friends; the artist’s painting of the writer is a masterpiece. Having published his novel The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James wrote a few years later, “There is no greater work of art than a great portrait—a truth to be constantly taken to heart by a painter holding in his hand the weapon that Mr. Sargent wields.”

Finding the wielder of that weapon in Seattle was a welcome surprise. The exhibition was called “John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family.” Who were the Wertheimers? According to introductory text on the wall, the father of the family, Asher, was a London art dealer of German Jewish descent who had commissioned portraits of himself and his wife in 1897 to honor their 25th wedding anniversary. Artist and patron became friends, and over the following decade, Sargent—at the height of his career—painted the couple’s 10 children as well, individually and in groups. He portrayed several of the Wertheimer women twice.

All 12 portraits were on view in Seattle, along with photographs, a Wertheimer genealogy, and other Sargent paintings and drawings. One photograph showed Sargent and two of the Wertheimers paused on a lawn during a game of croquet. Apparently, the artist had open invitations to Asher’s London townhouse and his country retreat in Berkshire.

Within a few minutes, I was entirely captivated—by the paintings, a sense of the stories they might tell, and a great many questions.

What had drawn Sargent to this family? How had they met? I associated him with portraits of British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins, not with Jews. Did he have other Jewish patrons and friends?

Why was the painting of the eldest Wertheimer son, Edward, unfinished?

What became of the elegantly dressed second son, Alfred, looking like an Edwardian aesthete with one hand on a stack of books? Why were there glass flasks on a wall beside him?

A lovely pencil sketch of the eldest daughter, Ena (Helena), was inscribed, “Jan. 25, ’10, to Ena, philoprocree, John S. Sargent.” Philoprocree? The caption on a nearby photograph identified her as Ena Wertheimer Mathias. Many of the exhibition items were credited to the collection of a Mrs. David Mathias. Which meant there were living descendants. Where?

Some of the paintings seemed to allude to works by earlier masters. Was Sargent playing with the history of portraiture in this series for a knowledgeable art dealer–patron?

Additional exhibition text explained that Asher’s father, Samson, had emigrated in the 1830s from Bavaria to England, where he founded the family art-dealing business. Several generations earlier, one ancestor had been court factor, also called court Jew, to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in Vienna. What was a “court Jew”?

Were Sargent and Asher drawn together in part by shared outsider status in Victorian and Edwardian England, despite their professional successes? One, the leading portrait painter of the era—an American expatriate, lifelong bachelor, connoisseur of music and dance—was a cosmopolitan nomad. The other, a renowned expert on art with a lofty clientele and a luxurious lifestyle, lived in a society that regarded Jews as ineradicably “other” and art dealing, no matter how illustrious, as mere “trade.”

In these portraits and photographs, the Wertheimers’ faces looked distinctively Jewish and, to me, familiar. Some of my own ancestors had left southern Germany for America at about the time Samson Wertheimer had moved to England.

I bought the exhibition catalog at the Seattle Art Museum that day in 2001, wanting to know more about all of these people. And after I returned home to New York, I continued to think about Sargent and the Wertheimers.

Several years later, I wrote to the leading authority on Sargent, Richard Ormond, who is, among other things, the artist’s great-nephew and the coauthor, with Elaine Kilmurray, of the superb nine-volume Sargent catalogue raisonné. I asked him whether he thought it might be possible to write a book about Sargent and the Wertheimers. He replied that the story seemed fascinating but would probably be difficult to tell, since few Wertheimer letters or documents apparently survive.

Then, in the early spring of 2012, I found an email address for one of Asher’s great-grandsons, Julian Mathias. We corresponded and spoke by phone; in October 2012, I went to see him in England. He recounted many stories about the family, put me in touch with a number of his relatives, and gave me three thick files of letters and documents to copy.

Next, on a perfect October English day of alternating rain and sun, I visited Julian’s aunt Kay Mathias at her house in the rural county of Kent. She was the American-born widow of Ena Wertheimer Mathias’s youngest son and, at 90, the oldest surviving member of the family. She owned many of the objects I had seen in the Seattle exhibition and others as well, including a Louis Quinze–style armchair in which Asher Wertheimer’s wife, Flora, had posed for one of her two Sargent portraits.

Kay and I spent the day talking—her memory was very sharp—and looking through photographs, letters, and a handwritten Wertheimer genealogy book. She readily identified people in the photographs, told me new stories, added details to those I’d been gathering. She had owned Sargent’s pencil sketch of Ena, as well as several watercolors the artist had given to various Wertheimers, but she and her children had sold them. First, though, she had had them all photographed; the photos were on the walls in her house.

Another Wertheimer descendant, Yolanda Chetwynd, provided more information, including a lengthy unpublished memoir by her grandmother, Ena’s eldest daughter. It was beginning to seem as though there might be enough material for a book.

Learning about Sargent was somewhat easier than learning about the Wertheimers. There were outstanding critical studies, exhibition catalogs, hundreds of paintings, and thousands of letters. In 1927, two years after Sargent died, his friend Evan Charteris published a brief biography. Charteris had the immense advantage of firsthand knowledge of his subject as well as access to the artist’s sisters and their papers, and he was able to quote extensively from Sargent’s early letters to childhood friends. But Sargent—reserved, elusive, deeply private—neither kept diaries nor saved his correspondence. His letters were widely dispersed among the recipients’ descendants and in libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Early on, I learned that Oxford’s Bodleian Library held about 200 of his letters to his good friend Lady Elizabeth Lewis. I ordered digital scans and quickly discovered that deciphering Sargent’s handwriting was somewhat like learning a new language: nearly impossible at first, easier as you go along. As I made slow headway, I found Sargent’s voice immensely appealing. In one note, he described all the people “I have forgotten I was to paint this spring” as a “meteor shower.” In another, he sounded not unlike Oscar Wilde: “What a tiresome thing a perfectly clear symbol would be.” And he mock-complained to Lady Lewis, as he worked on Asher’s large commission between 1897 and 1908, of being in a state of “chronic Wertheimerism.”

On another trip to England, I went to see 10 of the Wertheimer portraits in a Tate Gallery storage facility. The Tate has owned nine of the paintings since the 1920s and acquired the 10th in 1996; it has stored them off-site for most of that time.

I had made an appointment to see the paintings, and on the scheduled day, I traveled by underground, bus, and foot to a heavily guarded compound behind a gatehouse. After passing through checkpoints and a series of locked doors, I arrived at several large rooms in which people were examining paintings, moving them, preparing them for loans.

Ten is the maximum number of pictures one is allowed to request, and I had asked for 10. The woman assigned to help me, Sarah, was eight months pregnant; this was her last day of work before maternity leave. The paintings were stored vertically in huge racks that pulled out of their units on fixed tracks. To study them, I had to bend my head to the side or climb a scaffolding ladder. It was thrilling to see the portraits again, now that I was planning to write about them.

The figure in Asher Wertheimer had much more life than I remembered from Seattle, and more color: several reds in the face and hands, green-brown eyes, tones of white and yellow in the forehead. Holding his coat open in an expansive gesture, the art dealer looks self-possessed and astute.

In another of the portraits, Ena wears a long black cloak and plumed hat. Light from above falls on the hat’s white ostrich feathers, on lace ruffles at Ena’s neck and wrist, on her face turned back over one shoulder, laughing. Velvety grays define the shapes and folds of her cloak.

After examining the paintings for three hours, I asked Sarah how much time had been allotted for my visit. “Thirty minutes,” she said.

In his 1985 book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes describes the biographical process as a “haunting … an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. … [It is] a continuous living dialogue between [subject and author] as they move over the same historical ground.”

Holmes followed in the physical footsteps of some of his subjects. He took the walking trip, accompanied by a donkey, that Robert Louis Stevenson had taken with his donkey in the Cévennes mountains in 1878. He stayed in the Italian towns Percy Bysshe Shelley had lived in for the last months of his life. “I mark my beginning as a professional biographer,” Holmes writes, “from the day when my bank bounced a cheque because it was inadvertently dated 1772.” In trespassing on the lives of Sargent and the Wertheimers, I’ve inadvertently dated my own checks and correspondence 1898, or 1923.

The book I came to write, Family Romance, is a group portrait of Sargent, the Wertheimers, and their social worlds. It includes sketches of the main characters’ colleagues and friends, among them Monet, Picasso, Diaghilev, Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Ottoline Morrell, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, and numerous Rothschilds and Sassoons.

Their footsteps traced paths from Habsburg courts in early-18th-century Vienna to 20th-century Fascist Italy. They took me to Austria, Germany, Italy, Boston, Chicago, and frequently back to England. To collections of Sargent paintings on both sides of the Atlantic. To histories of Jews in Europe and Britain. To Asher Wertheimer’s London houses, altered but still there, and along his daily walk to his galleries in New Bond Street, spaces now occupied by luxury clothing shops. To Sargent’s light-filled house in Chelsea. To grand estates in Buckinghamshire that had belonged to Ferdinand and Alfred de Rothschild. To a great many libraries and archives. And, again and again, to see Kay Mathias in Kent.

The adventure of “haunting” and being haunted by these figures also took me deep into the 19th-century art world and the political and economic turmoil that radically altered people’s lives over the course of that century. A decline in “old” aristocratic wealth and privilege, along with a rise in “new” (often American, sometimes Jewish) fortunes, reordered the transatlantic social landscape and created dynamic international markets for art. The Wertheimers were major players in that drama. Sargent brilliantly portrayed it.

This essay is adapted from Jean Strouse’s forthcoming book, Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November.