Home > News > Portrait of an Artist and his Jewish Patrons: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
January 21, 2025 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson.
As a celebrated portrait artist, John Singer Sargent had his choice of commissions at the turn of the twentieth century. The most aristocratic, glamorous, “high society” figures of England and the United States clamored to have him paint their portraits. Yet the largest commission Sargent ever undertook for a private patron was from Asher Wertheimer, a London art dealer. Wertheimer asked for twelve portraits of his large Jewish family. This notable commission, which took Sargent a decade to complete, is the subject of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse, an engrossing, richly illustrated group biography.
Born in Florence, Italy, to American parents, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) grew up and lived most of his life in Europe. In 1887, he moved to London and likely met Asher Wertheimer sometime after that.
Asher Wertheimer (1843–1918), was born in London, but his parents were German-Jewish immigrants from Bavaria. His father, Samson Wertheimer, moved to England in 1839 and built a successful business selling antiques and his own finely crafted bronze works. Asher continued the business but transitioned into fine art dealing for wealthy patrons.
Asher first commissioned Sargent to do portraits of himself and his wife, Flora, for their 25th wedding anniversary in 1896. He then requested ten more portraits, depicting his ten children, some individually and some in groups. Sargent soon developed a close friendship with Asher and the whole Wertheimer family. He was such a frequent guest that the Wertheimers dubbed their dining room, decorated with his portraits, “Sargent’s Mess.” And nearly every Sunday, Asher stopped by Sargent’s London studio to visit.
Strouse speculates that Asher and Sargent may have been drawn to each other by their “shared outsider status.” Sargent was an American living in England. Moreover, he had grown up roaming across Europe with his family, not even visiting the United States until he was twenty. According to one biographer, Sargent was “at home everywhere and belonged nowhere.”
As to Asher, despite his professional success and wealth, he lived within a society, writes Strouse, “that regarded Jews as ineradicably ‘other’ and art dealing . . . as mere ‘trade.’” Some of the criticism of Sargent’s Wertheimer portraits reflects this mindset.
As Strouse shows, Sargent’s Wertheimer portraits met with both “praise and venom” when they were exhibited, beginning in 1898. The portrait of Asher Wertheimer, in particular, elicited comments about Asher’s ethnicity. Asher’s expression, Strouse writes, “has been read as warm, wise, benevolently amused – and also as calculating and sly.” An American architect nastily jibed that Asher seemed to be “pleasantly engaged in counting golden shekels.”
Similarly, Sargent’s portrait of Ena and Betty, Asher’s eldest daughters, drew praise for the sisters’ vitality and “verve,” but also pointed references to their Jewishness. Sargent’s first biographer called the young women “splendid types of their race.”
After Asher and Flora died, nine of the portraits passed to Britain’s National Gallery under the terms of Asher’s will. Yet Parliament’s debate on the munificent bequest in 1923 reveals that the MPs were not uniformly appreciative. One recommended that “these clever, but extremely repulsive, pictures should be placed in a special chamber of horrors.” In stark contrast, the then-critic for The Times called the portraits “a little set of great masterpieces” that “illustrate an epoch.”
Over the years, Sargent’s popularity has waxed and waned, but today museums mount frequent Sargent exhibitions for enthusiastic crowds. Contemporary critics judge the portraits of Asher and Ena and Betty to be among Sargent’s finest work.