All portraits rely on the collaboration of artist and sitter, however not often do each events look like having a lot enjoyable as in John Singer Sargent’s second portrait of the Anglo-Jewish heiress Ena Wertheimer, a piece of 1904 that he playfully gave an Italian title, A Vele Gonfie—“in full sail” (see illustration beneath). Although in 1904 Sargent additionally declared himself “sick of portrait painting,” A Vele Gonfie betrays no signal of that disaffection, until one considers the exuberance with which the picture sends up the conventions at which its maker chafed. “The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, accidental,” Sargent’s fellow artist Edward Burne-Jones had decreed towards the top of his profession; but when the stories of A Vele Gonfie’s origins are to be credited, it was exactly the fleeting impression of how Ena swept into his studio, garments billowing behind her, that Sargent sought to seize in paint. Somewhat than spotlight the expanse of his topic’s naked neck and arms, as he had finished in his earlier portrait of Ena together with her youthful sister Betty, he selected to take advantage of the doubtless androgynous attract of her six-foot determine by reworking her—together with her evident complicity—right into a dashing cavalier.
Work are usually not snapshots, in fact, and this impact of spontaneity is itself an artifice. The cloak that appears to puff out “in full sail,” for instance, is seemingly held in place with assistance from a broomstick that the artist instructed his sitter to carry—although “sitter” is hardly the suitable time period for Ena on this explicit encounter, as Jean Strouse aptly observes in Household Romance. (Some viewers, she stories, understandably mistook the broomstick for a sword.) Nor, presumably, did the eldest daughter of the Wertheimer clan burst into Sargent’s studio dressed as a member in good standing of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. The painter was concurrently at work on an official portrait of the Marlborough household that the duke had commissioned as a pendant to at least one painted for an ancestor by Sir Joshua Reynolds over a century earlier, and the proof means that it was his plumed hat and gown—“or improvised copies”—that the pair mischievously adopted for A Vele Gonfie.
To check the liveliness of such an image with an train in dynastic portraiture like The Marlborough Household (1904–1905) could appear unfair, particularly for the reason that duke had summoned Sargent to commemorate a household on the breaking point: having entered into an organized marriage with the rich American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in an effort to protect his Blenheim property, he had lengthy been estranged from his sad spouse, and the couple formally separated the 12 months after the portray was accomplished. However to show from the spirited efficiency of A Vele Gonfie to the aristocratic formality and stiff poses of The Marlborough Household—a up to date observer known as the duchess “a simpering doll”—is to grasp what the artist meant when he took to writing dismissively, in non-public correspondence no less than, of “paughtraits.” To juxtapose the 2 work is maybe additionally to sense what the poet and polemicist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in thoughts just a few years later when he remarked a few portrait of the previous Aline de Rothschild, now Woman Sassoon, that Sargent “paints nothing but Jews and Jewesses now and says he prefers them, as they have more life and movement than our English women.”
Blunt’s report of the artist’s clientele was wildly exaggerated. Strouse calculates that not more than 5 p.c of the sitters for the roughly 1,300 oils and charcoals that Sargent produced have been Jewish. However amongst that 5 p.c was the artist’s best patron, Asher Wertheimer, a rich London artwork vendor of German Jewish ancestry and the patriarch of the household whose story Strouse units out to inform. Between 1896, when Asher ordered portraits of himself and his spouse, Flora, to have a good time their silver marriage ceremony anniversary, and 1908, when the painter accomplished an Orientalized picture of one of many couple’s youthful daughters, Almina, Sargent produced a dozen work of the Wertheimer clan: the only largest such fee, considered collectively, within the artist’s prolific profession. A Vele Gonfie, which Asher introduced to Ena as a marriage reward on the event of her marriage to Robert Mathias in 1905, was the tenth within the sequence. By the point Sargent put the ending touches on the image of Almina, he had spent over a decade engaged in what he jokingly termed “chronic Wertheimerism.” Asher in flip selected to hold a lot of the sequence in his eating room at Connaught Place, the place their creator was such a frequent visitor that it grew to become often called “Sargent’s Mess.”
In 2015 the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York sought to unsettle the obtained view of Sargent as a trendy recorder of excessive society by collectively organizing an exhibition centered on his extra experimental portraits of artists and buddies—portraits, they emphasised, that have been sometimes not commissioned however originated with the painter himself, usually as a gesture of friendship to the topic. In response to an anecdote recorded within the catalog, a customer to his studio as soon as pointed to a portrait of a society hostess and requested how he might bear to color like that, when he might additionally paint the portrait of the musician George Henschel that hung close by. “I loved Henschel,” Sargent merely replied.1
However whereas the inscription “to my friend Henschel” implies that the musician’s portrait most likely did function a present, the road between portray for love and portray for cash in Sargent’s case proved onerous to keep up—a incontrovertible fact that the organizers of the exhibition implicitly acknowledged after they selected to incorporate the portray of Asher amongst their “Portraits of Artists and Friends.” Although he was one of the educated artwork sellers of his day, Asher was actually not an artist himself, and it appears clear that there would have been no fee within the first place had he not been capable of afford Sargent’s asking value, which Strouse stories was sometimes one thousand guineas per portrait within the late Eighteen Nineties (roughly $170,000 at this time). Because the commissions multiplied over the next decade, a substantial sum of cash should have handed from Asher’s pockets to Sargent’s. But Strouse’s account of their relation isn’t merely a chronicle of creative patronage. Because the title of Household Romance implies, one thing like friendship, too, was within the air when Sargent painted the Wertheimers.
Having beforehand written acclaimed biographies of Alice James and J.P. Morgan, Strouse was in a single sense coming into acquainted territory when she got down to reconstruct the Wertheimers’ world. Like Sargent, as she notes on the outset, each her earlier topics have been Individuals who lived transatlantic lives within the latter half of the nineteenth century and the primary a long time of the 20th. Alice’s brother Henry, the novelist, was good friend of the painter’s and an avid supporter of his work; Morgan was a outstanding artwork collector in addition to a financier and banker. By Strouse’s personal account, her curiosity in regards to the Wertheimers was additionally piqued by the sense of recognition the portraits elicited when she first encountered them at a touring exhibition in Seattle greater than 20 years in the past and noticed options acquainted to her from the German Jewish milieu of her childhood.
However a biographer wants greater than affinity for her topic: she additionally requires documentary proof. And in that respect no less than, the Wertheimers initially appeared fairly unpromising. Nothing just like the reams of writing left behind by the Jameses or the “vaults” of uncataloged paperwork that Strouse found within the Morgan Library when she launched into her biography of the banker has survived from Asher and his descendants. Although she did handle to show up some sudden finds, together with a cache of letters from Sargent that she was the primary to achieve transcribing (their earlier proprietor had discovered his handwriting indecipherable) after which serendipitously acquired for herself, the written report stays sparse. Certainly, one of many puzzles Household Romance helps to unravel is why the Wertheimers, who of their day rivaled corporations nonetheless storied within the artwork world like Knoedler or Agnews, roughly vanished from public consciousness—besides, in fact, as a collective topic of Sargent’s brush. Portraitists are sometimes employed with posterity in thoughts, however Asher might have chosen much more correctly than he knew when he determined to commemorate twenty-five years of marriage to the daughter of one other art-dealing dynasty by ordering up two portraits by Sargent.
The couple weren’t altogether proud of the portray of Flora—she reportedly thought her lace-trimmed robe, adorned with diamonds and pearls, made her look “too rich”—and 6 years later Sargent was invited to provide a second model, clad in sober black, that apparently met with extra favor. Publicly, nevertheless, it was Asher’s portrait that was apt to impress controversy. Wearing black, a gold watch-chain dangling from his waistcoat, the topic emerges from a darkish background with an amused gleam in his eye as he pinches a cigar between his fingers and gazes confidently on the viewer. A big black canine stands at his facet, its lengthy pink tongue contributing to the partly comedian impact, even because it threatens to echo—and exaggerate—the moist crimson lips of his human companion. Hovering between caricature and an train in grand portraiture within the custom of Titian and Velázquez, the portray has lengthy tended to divide its viewers, functioning as one thing of “a cultural Rorschach test”—the phrase is Strouse’s—for perceptions of antisemitism.
When Asher’s portrait was first exhibited on the Royal Academy in 1898, The Athenaeum might hardly include its enthusiasm. Invoking the portray’s “profound and courageous sense of humour” and “extraordinary simplicity of technique,” the assessment concluded by cheerfully hailing the topic of this “masterpiece”: “Happy is the man whose portrait has been painted thus.” However different observers have been far much less able to sing its praises. The American architect I.N. Phelps Stokes, who figured in a double portrait by Sargent painted across the similar time, noticed the unfinished image of Asher within the artist’s studio and remarked that he appeared “pleasantly engaged in counting golden shekels.” A Punch cartoon of 1898 underneath the heading “Unconscious Humour at the Royal Academy” enlarged the sitter’s nostril and paunch, changed the cigar with cash, and added a speech bubble within the type of a caption. “What only this monish [money] for that shplendid dog,” the determine seems to be saying: “Ma tear it is ridic’lush!” When Asher later pledged 9 of the Wertheimer portraits to the nation, a member of Parliament disbursed with the joking and easily demanded that the authorities retailer the “repulsive” work out of sight.
Tate Britain
John Singer Sargent: Asher Wertheimer, 1989
Writing of Asher’s portrait in a ebook revealingly entitled John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist (2000), one of many artist’s most acute critics, Trevor Fairbrother, noticed that the sitter’s “Jewishness, masculine self-confidence, entrepreneurial power, and sensuousness all radiate from the picture,” and regardless of the alarms that cluster of nouns would possibly set off, the proof means that Asher was inclined to agree. (Elsewhere Fairbrother has termed the canine, a black poodle named Noble, “the happiest pet in all of Sargent.”) The Wertheimers have been clearly able to registering their dissatisfaction with an image—witness the request for a second try at Flora—however quite than hunt down a extra conventionally flattering portraitist, Asher responded to Sargent’s work by ordering up ten extra portraits over the next decade. Not all of those have the vitality of Asher Wertheimer, however the very best of them, like A Vele Gonfie and the double portrait of Ena and Betty, are among the many most arresting photographs Sargent painted. Although Strouse stories that a few of the Wertheimers’ buddies took offense at Sargent’s portrayal of Asher, his determination to memorialize himself by bequeathing the portrait to the nation testifies that he felt in any other case.2
Most of what we find out about Sargent’s facet of the connection have to be deduced from the work themselves, however Strouse’s ebook helps to fill within the image. His mock criticism about “chronic Wertheimerism” however, the proof she has collected tends to verify that he, too, shared within the excessive spirits and sense of heat captured by his portraits of Ena and Asher. Sargent appears to have been notably near Ena—so shut, the truth is, that her husband later questioned if that they had been lovers, although the Wertheimers’ obvious lack of concern about this testifies to the simple rapport they appear to have established with the artist. An anecdote variously attributed to Flora within the early days of the friendship and to Betty after Ena’s loss of life means that the household had an ordinary response to such worries. “Of course not,” Flora replies in a single model of the story, “he’s only interested in Venetian gondoliers.”
Robert’s query about his late spouse’s sexual historical past seems to have been motivated by his discovery of the identical cache of seemingly illegible letters that Strouse later deciphered. However quite than a scandalous secret, the temporary extracts she reproduces supply intimations of the playfulness—and enthusiasm—on show when the artist painted his favourite Wertheimers. Over the course of his profession, Sargent produced some spectacular portraits of sisters: Henry James’s first view of The Wyndham Sisters on the Royal Academy in 1900, as an illustration, prompted him to check the expertise to watching “the lady…shot from the cannon.” However whereas it was clearly the artist’s bravura efficiency that blew James away, viewers’ responses to the double portrait of Ena and Betty seem to have been provoked by artist and topics alike.
The image reveals the 2 girls boldly striding ahead, Ena’s arm wrapped round Betty’s waist, their low-cut robes a vivid juxtaposition of gleaming ivory and crimson that concurrently heightens and reverses the distinction between the rosy-cheeked older sister and her paler sibling. When Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer (1901) took its flip on the Royal Academy, The Instances pronounced it “instinct with life,” a verdict that even Roger Fry, who sometimes had no use for Sargent, managed to echo when he adopted up his certified reward of the image—“in its way a masterpiece”—by remarking on its topic: “The poses of the figures are full of spontaneity and verve, and the contrast between the leaning figure of the younger girl and the almost exaggerated robustness of her sister is entirely felicitous.” As Strouse pointedly observes, “the lacy strap sliding off [Ena’s] right shoulder summons the ghost of Madame X,” whose equally positioned strap had precipitated a minor scandal on the Paris Salon virtually 20 years earlier. However quite than “the icy artifice” of that “professional beauty,” together with her “powdered pallor, theatrical sexuality, and air of arriviste hauteur…these young women are warm, natural, radiantly alive.” Not like that solitary magnificence, one would possibly add, they face the viewer straight, and what they’re proudly placing on show can be their affection for one another.
It’s simple to think about why Sargent might need been drawn to their firm. In an influential essay on the painter timed to coincide along with his first skilled go to to the USA, James concurrently paid tribute to the “slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle” of his younger good friend’s expertise and nervous that that very precociousness would possibly tempt him to chill out and take issues simple. “Having knowledge to spare he may be tempted to play with it and waste it,” the novelist brooded, however to guage by the remainder of Sargent’s profession, extra play—James’s different phrase was “larkiness”—might have been simply what was wanted. Although Asher’s commissions may not have afforded Sargent the sort of freedom he ultimately attained when he took off for the Continent and plein air watercolors, the informality of the Wertheimer family should nonetheless have been a welcome respite from the constraints of aristocratic portraiture.
On the time he was portray Ena and Betty, Sargent introduced Claude Monet, who was in London for his Homes of Parliament sequence, to dine on the Wertheimers’. (The 2 had recognized one another for a quarter-century, ever for the reason that twenty-year-old Sargent had excitedly rushed as much as the older artist at a gallery in Paris.) Monet later wrote an enthusiastic account of the event to his spouse:
The home is certainly fairly extraordinary, a palace with some very stunning issues and a fairly distinctive society, nothing however Jews, or virtually, an infernal din and really relaxed manners regardless of a excessive diploma of class, ten youngsters, 5 daughters, three of them married and several other fairly stunning; dinner lavish and fairly good…. As Sargent and I have been leaving, they sat right down to play video games. It’s a extremely extravagant, loopy place; the daddy and mom are good folks.
Monet’s numbers are barely off—there have been six daughters, not 5, and just one was married on the time—however he nonetheless seems to have gotten the environment proper. When Sargent as soon as instructed Ena that he would attempt to cease by after dinner, “& if I do I shall crawl in on all fours straight to you,” he was writing very a lot in the identical spirit.
After all, the Wertheimers hadn’t at all times lived on such a lavish scale. Strouse closes her narrative by invoking “a world in radical flux,” and it was the mobility of that world—not simply the social mobility however the bodily circulation of individuals and artwork objects alike—that introduced an expatriate artist like Sargent into conjunction with a household like theirs. Although Asher might hint his lineage again to a distinguished rabbi and financier, Samson Wertheimer, whose service as a “court factor” to 3 Holy Roman Emperors had earned him the title of Judenkaiser (emperor of the Jews), his personal father, additionally named Samson, had merely recognized himself as a “merchant” when he emigrated from Bavaria to England in 1839. Like many such immigrants, this Samson settled within the East Finish of London, married a lady from his native city, and proceeded to work his approach up, shifting first from Spitalfields to Soho after which to Mayfair as his fortunes improved.
Specializing in ornamental objects manufactured from bronze, together with the gilded kind often called ormolu, Samson ran his store with assistance from craftsmen recruited from Paris, and by 1854 he had acquired a royal warrant, signifying that his agency had equipped items or companies to royal households for no less than 5 years. 20 years later he obtained a fee to redecorate Clarence Home, the neoclassical mansion by which the current king and queen have chosen to stay quite than transfer to Buckingham Palace after Charles’s coronation.
Amongst Samson’s different precious purchasers have been Lionel and Anthony de Rothschild, and Rothschilds continued to cross paths with the Wertheimers, each professionally and socially, for over half a century. Certainly, the Rothschilds’ reliance on the Wertheimer agency grew to become such widespread data that when Samson paid 9,900 guineas in 1887 for a portrait by François Boucher, The Instances of London mistakenly reported that he was performing as their agent, solely to difficulty a hasty correction: “Mr. S. Wertheimer, of…New Bond-street” had bought the portrait of Madame de Pompadour “on his own account.” After his loss of life 5 years later, the identical paper duly took be aware of the spectacular inventory Samson had left behind: “Messrs. Wertheimer have always been fastidious buyers, and there is surprisingly little in the collection that can be set down as common or ordinary.”
Although each of Samson’s sons adopted him into the enterprise, it was Asher, quite than his older brother Charles, who succeeded in constructing on that legacy. Whereas “wicked Uncle Charlie,” as he was recognized within the household, traded—typically dubiously—from the treasure-filled residence into which he had settled along with his mistress, Asher took over his father’s Bond Avenue gallery and proceeded to make some outstanding purchases. Among the many most necessary was a set of eighty-three Dutch and Flemish work that had been amassed over generations by a household of Scottish bankers and merchants named Hope, who had settled in Amsterdam earlier than shifting to England on the shut of the eighteenth century. The Hope assortment included footage by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, and Van Dyck, in addition to different well-known artists, and its look available on the market had understandably aroused stiff competitors. But when Asher’s success is a tribute to his acuity, the next historical past of the transaction additionally helps to clarify why the Wertheimer agency might have left fewer marks on the official report than a few of its much less scrupulous rivals.
Although the story is considerably tangled and onerous to reconstruct, Asher appears to have invited a type of rivals, P. & D. Colnaghi, to share within the buy—most likely, Strouse speculates, in an effort to assist with the position of so many footage—solely to have Colnaghi proceed to chop him out of the negotiations and supply the very best works to its personal purchasers. Along with a Colnaghi accomplice named Otto Gutekunst, the members on this scheme notably included Bernard Berenson, who operated along with his attribute slipperiness, particularly when it got here to fronting for the agency with the distrustful Isabella Stewart Gardner. Having beforehand been burned by Colnaghi, Gardner wished nothing to do with it, however Berenson shamelessly lied his approach into the deal, inflating each costs and his personal involvement within the course of. On the similar time, one other Colnaghi accomplice was busy elbowing Asher apart in negotiations with the distinguished director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Wilhelm Bode, even though the Wertheimers had been working with Bode for over a decade.
Because the Wertheimer information have disappeared, Strouse has to infer Asher’s facet of the story from the proof left behind by others, however she argues plausibly that he misplaced out as a result of he lacked the aggressiveness and capability for self-promotion required to maneuver amid “the brutal tactics of the modern competitive marketplace.” Her narrative suggests, the truth is, that his comparative lack of aggression and the gaps within the documentary report are associated. “The Colnaghi partners commandeered the Hope sale so thoroughly,” she writes, “that Asher’s name has been obscured in accounts of it for more than a hundred years.”
Between his expertise with Colnaghi and a protracted lawsuit to get better an unpaid debt that additionally concerned some shady strikes by his estranged brother, Asher appears to have determined that he most well-liked quietly financing offers behind the scenes quite than actively collaborating in them up entrance—but one more reason, in fact, why his identify might typically disappear from the official report. Although Strouse stories, as an illustration, that he collectively bought Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid with the London artwork vendor Arthur J. Sulley earlier than promoting it to the German entrepreneur from whom it was later acquired by Henry Clay Frick, Asher’s half within the affair doesn’t at the moment seem within the account of the portray’s provenance on the web site—essentialvermeer.com—that in any other case paperwork such issues meticulously. The location does, nevertheless, credit score Asher along with Colnaghi for the transaction that resulted in transferring Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine from the Hope assortment to the museum in Berlin.
Nor did the principles of patrilineage assist to perpetuate the household identify, even though the Wertheimer brothers had six sons between them. Asher and Flora’s eldest son, Edward, had been destined to take over the agency, however he had barely begun his profession when he died of typhoid contracted from consuming uncooked shellfish on his honeymoon in Paris. (Sargent’s portrait of Edward, who was twenty-nine on the time, stays appropriately unfinished.) The loss was all of the extra poignant as a result of it had been preceded some 4 months earlier by the loss of life of the Wertheimers’ second son, Alfred: a extra troubled determine than Edward, he had quarreled along with his father over his want to be an actor and overdosed on morphine on the age of twenty-six. Sargent, whose portrait of Alfred had turned the younger man right into a minor celeb when it appeared in 1902, apparently tried to mediate between father and son, to no avail.
Each of Charles’s sons additionally died childless inside 5 years of one another, reportedly from typhoid, although Strouse speculates that the official rationalization of their circumstances might have been a display for suicide. The one males of their technology to survive their dad and mom have been Asher’s two youthful sons, Conway and Ferdinand (“Bob”), however since they responded to the outbreak of World Struggle I, as did different British Jews on the time, by anglicizing their names, they too helped to obscure the Wertheimer inheritance. Neither one had any youngsters, so the Conways, as each confusingly selected to name themselves, died out as nicely. Ena, however, managed to provide 5 youngsters in seven years, however these, in fact, weren’t Wertheimers, although their fast look did event an extra little bit of playfulness from Sargent, who mischievously coined the time period philoprocree—lover of procreation—in an effort to inscribe a sketch of their mom.
Of all Asher’s offspring, it was Ena who got here closest to perpetuating his legacy, even when she didn’t accomplish that as a Wertheimer. Her preliminary hopes of changing into a painter might have been dashed when Walter Sickert, with whom she studied on the Slade, instructed her she’d “better go home and learn how to wash and iron,” however she appears to have had no intention of settling in as a housewife. Seven years after her father’s loss of life, she, too, opened a gallery and marked the occasion with a mortgage exhibition of works by Sargent, who had died just some months earlier. Tellingly, nevertheless, the present primarily featured his watercolors quite than portraits in oil: a selection underlined by the accompanying catalog, which made some extent of the liberation they represented. Questioning whether or not “the real John Sargent” was “the rather unapproachable chef d’école in his great studio or the happy wanderer in his gondola moored off the Salute, painting furiously between sun and water,” the catalog went on to announce that, within the current present, “we shall only find…the great man at play” and will probably be “free to enjoy ourselves with something of the pleasure that was his as he worked.”
The avowed purpose of Ena’s gallery was to advertise the work of youthful artists, and whether or not or not she consciously meant the present as a farewell gesture, that is kind of the way it functioned. Every week after it closed, the gallery adopted it with an exhibition of stage designs for the Ballets Russes, whose founder, Serge Diaghilev, had turn out to be a good friend and frequent visitor at Ena’s dinner desk. Subsequent reveals included work by Fernand Léger, Raoul Dufy, Pavel Tchelitchew, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and Vanessa Bell, amongst others. One acquaintance dubbed Ena “a kind of high priestess of modern art,” and from the angle of artwork historical past, there’s something satisfying about the best way by which a lady as soon as near Sargent now socialized with the likes of Diaghilev and Picasso.
But it surely’s tougher to grasp—and forgive—her determination to dump A Vele Gonfie. Although Strouse speculates that she might have meant the proceeds to help the brand new gallery, she additionally notes that Ena was a rich girl with a beneficiant inheritance. Maybe the truth that her much less aesthetically adventurous husband opposed the sale inspired her determination, for the reason that couple have been by this time more and more at odds.3 That Sargent had been conscious of Ena’s want to “get rid of” the image earlier than his loss of life—the phrase is his—solely deepens the puzzle. To cite her in any other case sympathetic biographer: “How could she?”
