“What a tiresome thing a perfectly clear symbol would be.” So declared the painter John Singer Sargent in a letter to his friend, the hostess extraordinaire Lady Elizabeth Lewis. Portraitists of all kinds would do well to live by Sargent’s words. The surest way to kill a portrait is to freight it with too tidy a significance, to straitjacket its subject into a single posture and, in doing so, restrict the play of meanings that characterizes real artistry.
Consider Sargent’s famous 1884 painting, Madame X. In it, Virginie Amélie Gautreau, a beautiful and beautifully made-up woman, looks sharply to her left. The viewer’s eye, though, is drawn to the painting’s center: to Gautreau’s white, white skin and to her black, black dress. Gautreau’s skin is so white because it is so powdered; her dress is so black because it contrasts so markedly with her skin. The straps of her dress are jeweled, their intricacy playing off the bareness of her chest—and there is a controversially great deal of bare chest to be played off. Madame X dramatizes how beauty can be not so much a natural gift as an achieved effect. Gautreau masterfully reveals and conceals her body; she knows that what she’s doing will titillate and scandalize.
As Jean Strouse writes in Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30, 336 pp.), Gautreau, born in Louisiana to a rich French banker, “was a new modern type, a ‘professional beauty’ known for being known. Her appearance was a work of artifice, her body the canvas.” An Instagram personality avant la lettre, we might say. Strouse goes on: “Sargent originally titled the painting Madame *** to protect her identity, although no one in fashionable Paris would have failed to recognize her. A foreign-born social climber, self-promoter, reputed sexual adventurer, she—her image—seemed to represent all the invasive forces threatening the social order of fin-de-siècle France.” But, of course, she didn’t just represent such forces. It’s in the nature of an image to suggest more than one meaning, and Gautreau’s image, in real life but especially in Sargent’s rendering, says complex things about society (the old ways are dying and here is why), aesthetics (beauty is style and style a kind of performance), and erotic attraction (not-quite nudity can be the sexiest thing of all). Gautreau may have been called “X” to protect her identity, but I like to think she’s also called this because she, like a mathematical variable, refuses to be pinned down. Whatever else she is, she isn’t a perfectly clear symbol.
What’s true for the painter is true for the biographer, and Strouse, like Sargent, is interested in texture and detail rather than clear-cut symbolism. As its title indicates, Family Romance offers several portraits at once. There’s the painter John Singer Sargent, who was both hailed as a genius (Henry James wrote that Sargent made it seem “as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple matter of feeling”) and dismissed as a mere painter of surfaces (critic Roger Fry said of Sargent’s high-society portraits, “Wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist”). Then there’s the Wertheimers, a fabulously wealthy family of German Jewish descent whose patriarch, Asher, became friends with Sargent and whose ten children sat both individually and in groups for the American-expat painter. And then there’s the historical conditions that created such an artist, such a family, and such a friendship. In nineteenth-century England, agricultural depression meant that old-money families, possessed of significant art collections and exquisite furniture, needed cash. The rise of financial capitalism, in England but especially in America, meant that new-money families wanted the social and cultural validation that art might confer. And art dealers, many of them Jewish, were there to meet these demands.
Strouse’s first book, Alice James: A Biography (1980), was a masterpiece, and Family Romance displays similar virtues: stylistic elegance, critical sensitivity, and archival command. Strouse and Sargent, a James expert and a downright Jamesian figure, respectively, are well met. (Like Alice’s brother, Henry, Sargent was an almost certainly gay American who lived abroad; the two became good friends.) The history of the Wertheimers is far less well known or documented. Samson Wertheimer emigrated to England from Bavaria in 1839 and made a killing in antiques, eventually purchasing decorative and fine art on behalf of the Vanderbilts and the Rothschilds; his son, Asher, inherited the business and a great deal of money, coming to specialize in the buying and selling of work by the Dutch masters. By the time of Asher’s friendship with Sargent, the Wertheimers were, as the historian Eugene C. Black puts it, “English people of the Jewish persuasion”: rich, connected, not entirely at home in upper-crust English circles but not entirely not at home, either.
In Sargent’s 1898 portrait, Asher has one hand in his vest pocket; the other holds a cigar. He looks boldly at the viewer. His head is tilted forward, as if he’s about to stride off to some business. He’s in command. He knows this; you know this; and he knows that you know this. Portraying the unashamed boldness of a rich Jewish man came with its complications. An American viewer said that Asher seemed to be “pleasantly engaged in counting golden shekels”; some of Asher’s friends took offense at the painting. But Asher himself liked it and commissioned more family portraits. Sargent, who loved a good meal, spent so much time at the Wertheimer townhouse that the dining room came to be called Sargent’s Mess.
In 1907, Sargent responded to a complaint about an in-progress painting with a witty remark: “A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!” Style, in painting and in biography, resides in the smutch of subjectivity: the place where you can see the shaping hand, where the thing being portrayed comes alive because you know that it’s being portrayed by and from a particular perspective. Strouse begins Family Romance with the book’s origin story. In 2001, she saw an exhibit of Sargent’s Wertheimer portraits in Seattle. She was immediately struck “by the paintings, a sense of the stories they might tell, and a great many questions”: questions about who the Wertheimers were and how they became friends with Sargent; questions about the role of Jewishness in their lives and in their portraits.
Strouse cares about Sargent in part because she cares about the Jameses. She cares about the Wertheimers in part because, as she writes, “some of my own ancestors had left southern Germany for America at about the same time Samson Wertheimer left there for England.” Indeed, many of her parents’ friends “had features strikingly similar to the ones in these paintings: dark hair, long faces, significant noses, hooded eyes.” In other words, there is a personal dimension to the subjects Strouse has chosen, just as there is a personal dimension—which is to say, a style—to her sentences.
The Wertheimers also provided Strouse with a research challenge. Unlike the Jameses, they didn’t leave behind extensive correspondence. They attained professional success, made a lot of money, and then largely left the historical record. Only two of Asher’s sons had children. During World War I, they both changed their last name to Conway in order to, as Strouse writes, “avoid any identification with the enemy, and no doubt also to avoid sounding Jewish.” Among many other things, Family Romance is a triumph of archival footwork. But sweat isn’t enough to make a biography work. Thankfully, Family Romance also displays the portraitist’s touch. To demonstrate Sargent’s reticence, she quotes another letter: “O for Henry James’ faculty of saying something so cautiously that you only know what he meant the next day.” A perfect detail, perfectly deployed. (And perfectly resonant, as it suggests why the shy Sargent might have been attracted to, and interested in showing forth, Asher’s intrepid gaze.)
To see what makes Strouse such an excellent biographer, it’s worth considering a counterexample. In A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson (Viking, $35, 480 pp.), Camille Peri has a great story to tell: the love between, and eventual marriage of, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift. I put Stevenson first in this pairing since most readers will know the Scottish author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Peri puts Fanny first because hers is an act of biographical recuperation. She argues that Fanny, an American nonconformist, was interesting in her own right (absolutely true: she lived in mining towns, fled across country from her wastrel of a first husband, studied painting in Paris, and wrote stories of her own in addition to cowriting a novel with her husband) and goes on to assert that, “without Fanny, there would be no Robert Louis Stevenson as we know him.” (True, I suppose, but also rather trivial.)
Peri knows everything there is to know about the Stevensons and her book is filled with superb set pieces: Fanny’s time in Paris, where her daughter, also a would-be painter, is shown around the Académie Julian by Abigail May Alcott, the model for Amy in Little Women; the Stevensons’ honeymoon in an abandoned silver mine in California; their stretch at Saranac Lake in upstate New York, where they hoped the clean air would heal Stevenson’s lifelong sickliness (things were so cold, Peri reports, that “Louis’s buffalo coat froze to the kitchen door”); their later years living in Hawaii and Samoa. And yet, despite the impressive research, this dual biography doesn’t quite work for two reasons. First, Peri lacks a literary sensibility. She describes Stevenson’s plots but doesn’t get across the sheer delight of his prose: its weird combination of the straightforward and the uncanny. As Andrew O’Hagan has memorably written, “There is always the feeling with his work that the reader is witness to common sense and boisterous enchantment lighting out for the territory.” By contrast, in A Wilder Shore, you only get bland critical summaries: Kidnapped “soars far above conventional young adult fare because of its moral complexity, sophisticated view of the fraught history of Scottish nationalism, and ‘lustrous prose,’ in the words of Scottish novelist Margot Livesey.”
The book’s second weakness is related to the first. Peri wants to foreground Fanny’s story because she sees her as a kind of progressive heroine: unconventional, unashamed of desire, willing to court scandal in the name of her own happiness. And she is interested in the Stevensons as a couple because their marriage seems more of our time than of theirs: “Louis admired Fanny for her courage and strong views—qualities then deemed almost exclusively masculine—and she appreciated him for his ‘feminine’ dreaminess and sensitivity.” This desire to see the present in the past, to praise the Stevensons insofar as they resemble 2025’s vision of healthy intimacy, leads to some cringey claims: “[F]or Louis, Fanny was the woman of a bad boy’s dreams”; Stevenson “was out to wave his freak flag in the face of smug and prosperous Edinburgh.”
Peri asserts that Fanny was a serious writer, though she admits that what there is isn’t all that impressive: “It is difficult to see Fanny’s fiction soaring to the polished heights of Wharton or Woolf based on the stories she did publish. However, had she been able to devote more time to writing, her stories might well have gained more nuance and depth over time.” Again, what’s missing here is any sense of the literary (“the polished heights of Wharton and Woolf”?), any account of why we’d want to read a story or novel for anything other than its socially laudatory stances. When she does praise Fanny’s writing, it’s because it offers “a critique of a society that treats difference as a deformity to be corrected” or features a “female narrator [who] has a recurring nightmare of losing her voice.”
As Peri writes, “Literary wives are very often maligned as unaccomplished, manipulative, and emasculating women who were detrimental to their famous husbands’ careers.” The irony is that Peri’s book, in attempting to humanize Fanny, just turns her into a perfectly clear symbol of a different sort: not emasculating but progressive, not manipulative but liberated. In her introduction, Peri expresses her hope that Fanny might serve as “an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.” A decent social goal, to be sure, but not, I’d argue, why one should read literary biography.
