Kathy Adler
Sargent’s Wertheimer Portraits
Summary
Kathy Adler discusses the Wertheimer portraits, a series of twelve portrait paintings made by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) of the British art dealer Asher Wertheimer and his family. The series amounts to Sargent’s largest private commission.
Kathy Adler
Kathleen Adler is a freelance lecturer and curator, as well as a Pilates teacher. She was director of education at the National Gallery, London, for 11 years. During that time she co-curated Americans in Paris (2006), which travelled from London to the MFA Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has written extensively on 19th-Century French art. She has a BA (Hons) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Well, yes, there must be because they all had numerous children.
Oh no, not at all. The one brother died in the World War, in South Africa in 1902, and the other brother died, actually, on his honeymoon from food poisoning. He was said to have eaten a bad oyster. What a horrible way to die. And so, they both died in the same year, but not in any similar circumstances, at all. And their portraits, which I haven’t shown, were really rather conventional portraits. And we know, I think, very little about them. But anyway, they tragically died in the same year of 1902.
Well, there’s an enormous literature on Sargent, of course. A biography? I can’t, actually, think of specifically a biography. And one of the reasons for that is Sargent was a very, very private person. He was very circumspect about his private life. And, although we’re almost certain, no, we are certain, now, that he was gay, of course, at that time, that was something that had to be so concealed and so hidden. Obviously, think about Oscar Wilde, for instance. So, there’s very little information about his private life, really. And that leads one on to the fact that the Wertheimers also destroyed much of the documentation about their family. They just, I don’t know what they did, they threw it away. So, there’s very little documentation too, to support things about them. But sorry, that isn’t really much of a recommendation, but there is a very wide, very extensive literature, on all aspects of Sargent.