Kathy Adler
Sargent’s Wertheimer Portraits

Kathleen Adler - Sargent’s Wertheimer Portraits

- [Lauren] All right, so we’re two minutes in. So, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us, this Sunday. And apologies, Wendy could not be here today. So, I will introduce Kathleen. Kathleen Adler is now a freelance lecturer and curator and Pilates teacher. She was director of education at the National Gallery in London, for 11 years. During that time, she co-curated “Americans in Paris,” which travelled from London to the MFA Boston and the Metropolitan of Art, New York. She has written extensively on 19th century French art. She has a BA degree from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, in the University of London. And, today, she’ll be talking to us about Sargent and the Wertheimer portraits. So, Kathleen, whenever you’re ready, over to you.

• Hi, and good evening or wherever you are. Hello to everybody and thank you so much for being here. I’m going to start by giving you a little background as to why I am talking about this sir Sargent and the Wertheimer portraits, today. And I… well, in a moment, I want to give you the backstory because it’s quite an elaborate kind of backstory. Back in the mid 1990s, the Sargent paintings of the Wertheimer family were not on view in, what was then, the Tate Gallery, but I think it’s so long ago, I’m not sure, I think I saw one of the paintings and was intrigued by it and the whole story about it. And I got in touch with various people at the Tate and the person who was most interested was one of the conservators, Anna Southall, and Anna and I looked at all the portraits by Sargent of the Wertheimer family, largely in store at Tate, and one, at least, in the conservation studio. And one of the paintings, I’ll show them all to you in a moment, but one of the paintings in the group, did not yet belong to the Tate. And that was the painting “A Vele Gonfie,” which was acquired in 1996. So, as a result of this interest I contributed to an article to a book, which you see the cover here, “The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity.” The book was edited and introduced by the late, and much missed, Linda Nochlin and by Tamar Garb, who’s a professor at University College London. And, as you can see, it is concerned with the very issues at the heart of Sargent’s representations of the Wertheimer family.

So, I wrote this essay, John Singer Sargent’s portraits of the Wertheimer family, and the essay was published in this book, published by Thames and Hudson, in 1995, so long ago, with this cover by Kitai. The title, it was, supposedly, well not supposedly, was an illusion, to something that I can’t actually say because it involves the N word, but I’m sure you can guess what I mean. And from this interest in the portraits, it became evident to Norman Kleeblatt, who was then at the Jewish Museum in New York, that this would be an ideal opportunity to show the portraits. So, in 1999, the Jewish Museum in New York opened a show that included all 12 portraits of the Wertheimer family. We’ll discuss these numbers in a little while. And the show travelled quite widely. It went to New Orleans, it went to Richmond, Virginia, and it went to Seattle. And when the paintings, that belonged to, what was by then, Tate Britain, came back to Britain, in the early years of this century, for several years, I was, constantly, asking various people at the Tate, “Look, you’ve got these paintings. You actually own 10 of them. Why don’t you have an exhibit that shows all the paintings?” And nothing ever happened. And then, I guess, my life took over, and I had various other projects, including, as Lauren mentioned, the show of “Americans in Paris” and I, sort of, dropped this idea. And then about, I suppose, so difficult to tell, isn’t it, with the time lag that the pandemic’s introduced into our brains, I think about three or four years ago, I started to talk again to the then curator at Tate Britain and say, “You know, really, you have these paintings, why do you never show them?”

And there were a variety of reasons. Usually, that one or other of the paintings was promised to another exhibition, was out on loan, and so on and so forth. And so, nothing happened, until I was told, quite to my surprise, in November of last year, that the paintings were actually on view at Tate Britain, today, as we speak. And so, obviously, I went and had a look at them. It was the first time I’d seen them on the walls since I’d seen them at various manifestations of the American exhibition. That was exciting. And for most people, it would’ve been the first time that they’d seen any of them, anyway. So, here are three different versions of the room. It’s quite a large room, as you can see, with red walls. And what I want you, really, to notice is how large the paintings are. The gentleman on the left is actually looking at the smallest of the series of paintings, the painting of Almina. But just look how big the painting next to that. And that is “A Vele Gonfie,” which I mentioned earlier. And the painting on the right-hand screen is a portrait of Mrs. Wertheimer. Unfortunately, and you can see there’s two in these images, Tate Britain, today, is rather sparsely populated with visitors. And, although those two girls in the centre of my image look as if they might be avidly discussing the paintings, in actual fact, they weren’t. They were totally absorbed with their own texting and so on. They didn’t even look at them. So, here is this room, and we’ll discuss as as I go along, how amazing this is, that now, finally, they are on display. And now we need to look at the whole history of this project, of the portraits of the Wertheimers. So, here on the left, we see Asher Wertheimer, who started out this whole sequence of images by John Singer Sargent. Asher Wertheimer was born in Britain in 1844, and he took over the very successful business that his father, Sampson, had established. Sampson’s premises were in Newborn Street, but when Sampson died, in 1892, it appears that Asher decided to move to larger premises. And those premises, at 158 Newborn Street, are, today, where the Channel flagship store is. So, a very prominent and desirable place to be, close to the Burlington Arcade, close to the Royal Academy, close to the Ritz Hotel.

So Asher, at this time, and you see him in this portrait. in 1898, was an extremely successful dealer. He had connections to the Rothschilds and to other wealthy families. And he just arranged, together with Agnews, a major sale of the Francis Hope collection. So he was feeling very successful, very prosperous, I think, at at this time. And he decided that what he wanted was to have John Singer Sargent, the most eminent portraitist of the day, paint portraits of himself and his wife, Flora, to mark their silver winning anniversary. Sargent was extremely sought after. He received endless invitations to paint portraits of the aristocracy and the upper classes, and he was extremely expensive. But this, of course, was not in any way a deterrent for Asher. It was, rather, an incentive to see how he could persuade this portraitist to collaborate, with him and his wife, on these portraits, Sargent painted the image on the right of my screen, sorry, drew the image on the right of my screen, a small pencil sketch, as a preliminary. And I think it’s interesting because, in that sketch, Asher’s turned slightly away from the viewer and he’s, simply, wearing a large coat and there’s nothing much you can say about it. It’s rather nondescript, in a way. But in the final painting, Asher presents himself full face to the viewer, with one hand extended, holding a cigar, the other in his fob pocket.

And in the extreme corner of this painting, almost invisible, is his dog. Now, I love that, because one of my favourite paintings, Manet’s “Olympia,” also has an almost hidden animal, the cat at the end of the bed. But here is this dog. And I think the name of the dog says a lot about how Asher Wertheimer understood himself, in terms of British society and his place in it. The dog is called Noble. It’s a standard poodle, it’s really beautiful, and, of course, it has its tongue out, which critics saw as an indication of the sensuality of the Jewish sitter, not the dog so much, as the Jewish sitter. In any event, this portrait was shown at the Royal Academy in 1898 and it was very well received. And subsequently too, it was shown at various exhibitions. In fact, in 1911, the critic, Robert Ross, wrote about this portrait in “The Art Journal” saying that was one of the great male portraits of all time, comparable to, what he called, the Velazquez Doria portrait, which is a Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. So, that is the portrait of Asher. Now Asher, excuse me. Okay.

• Great.

• Great, okay. Asher’s premises at 158 Newborn Street is shown here in this image. I think this is, obviously, the basement, but it gives us some indication that he sold practically anything, clocks, various kinds of objet d'art, as well as paintings. The question’s been asked, how Asher Wertheimer and Sargent came to know each other. And, although there doesn’t seem to be any definitive answer to this, and I’ve spoken to Jean Strauss, who’s writing a biography of the Wertheimers, to ask her about this, she thought it was, largely, that they would’ve known each other through common acquaintances and so on. And, obviously, because Asher Wertheimer was so prominent a dealer, there’s very little doubt that Sargent would,, in fact,, have known his his gallery. Now, the next image I want to show is this one, and, beg your pardon, I don’t really… is this. Now, when you look at it, you might think, “Oh, well, that’s Asher Ver, isn’t it?” But I want to show it because I want to indicate that, through this whole process of the Wertheimer portraits, and their painting by Sargent, and their subsequent history, there is an underlying anti-Semitism. Now, this drawing,, in fact,, isn’t of Asher Wertheimer at all. And it was, actually, made in 1926 of Alfred Mond, the first baron Melchett. Alfred Mond, as it happens, was a cousin of one of Wertheimer’s sons-in-law. But you see all the characteristics of anti-Semitic caricature in this one image, the large nose, the fleshy lips, the large ears, the hair curling back over the collar, holding not a cigar, but a cigarette, and one hand in the fob pocket.

A creature of horror, really. And I want to indicate that there’s an undertow of this through the whole discussion that I’m outlining here, this evening or this afternoon, whenever. But let’s return to Asher’s request to Sargent to paint him and his wife for their silver wedding. So, Mrs. Wertheimer, Flora, born Flora Joseph, also came from a family of art dealers. And, obviously, she and Asher had been married in 1873. So, Sargent produced this painting for their silver wedding commemoration. And the family didn’t like it at all. Why? Now, I think that’s really interesting. This is one of the paintings that is not in the group owned by Tate Britain. It is,, in fact,, today, in the New Orleans Museum of Art. And why I think this painting was rejected by the family was because it is a fairly typical example of a Sargent painting a society lady, elegantly dressed in satin and lace, with an abundance of jewellery. She has one of those long strings of pearls that were incredibly fashionable at the time. But there’s no indication of her personality because, I think, that at the time Sargent painted her, he didn’t know her at all. Whereas there’s a sense with Asher that Sargent knew him and liked him a great deal by the time that he painted that famous portrait. The painting stayed in the family, but I’m not sure, I really don’t know, whether it was ever displayed with the other pictures, but it certainly was kept by the family. And then, finally, in 1978, it was given to the Hammer Galleries for sale by the grandson of one of the Wertheimer children, Hilda, whose name was Conway Wilson Young. And it was purchased, as I say in 1978. So, that’s interesting. And this is the second version of Mrs. Wertheimer. It was actually only made six years later in 1904. And, I think, it’s a very, very different portrait in that now, I think, Sargent knew Mrs. Wertheimer, and,, in fact,, Sargent knew her rather well. Sargent became almost adopted by the Wertheimer family.

He went for dinner every week. And he described the Wertheimer’s home as being Sargent’s mess, a place in which he was very comfortable, very familiar, and very well known. He also described himself, during these years, when he was painting these portraits, as being in a state of constant Wertheimerism. Asher, for his part, so loved Sargent painting his family that he wished there were even more Wertheimer children for Sargent to paint. And as there were,, in fact,, 10 of them living, two of them died in infancy, and two of them, at this point, when he painted Mrs. Wertheimer again, two of them had died two years earlier. But as there were 10 children to paint, I think that was really quite a lot. And I have a fantasy with this painting, of the second painting of Mrs. Wertheimer, that she was a person, I think, that of quite a lot of determination and resolve. We see her sitting forward slightly in her seat, holding firmly onto the arm of the seat. And I have this fantasy that Sargent came to dinner every Friday night and, that when Mrs. Wertheimer lit the candles, there was a moment, a pause in the life of the family, where they thought, where they contemplated, that moment of the lighting of the Shabbat candles. And then, after that, I think, usually the dining room was mayhem. All these children, all with very distinct personalities, talking and laughing and so on. And Mrs. Wertheimer, I think, seems very much in control in this painting. And so, the second one was very much more to the taste of the family and was, certainly, a very accepted part of the group of these Wertheimer portraits. Now, this is probably the best known of the series. It is a painting of Helena in the white dress, known as Ena, and her sister Betty. Helena was extraordinary for many reasons, but amongst other reasons, was that she was over six foot tall, so exceptionally tall at that date. And she was also very vivacious, very spirited.

And she was also known as somebody whose dresses often fell off her. You can see how tenuous the grip of that dress is on her. Just broach slips and that’s it. And she holds onto Betty with her hand around Betty’s waist. Betty holds a fan, which gives you a sense of movement in the painting. And they both look out at us, very much in command of themselves and very much enjoying the moment of being painted. So, they were painted by Sargent in his studio in Tite Street, and they were painted in the presence of Sargent’s best known, notorious, if you will, painting, his painting, his portrait, of Madame X, which had been shown at the Paris Salon in 1884, and was the subject of enormous critical comment, a massive amount of critical. And, in fact, became so notorious that Sargent felt he had actually leave Paris at that point. And he made his home in London. Excuse me. He kept the painting in his studio until he started to exhibit it in the early years of the 20th century. And then, finally, he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is where, of course, it now is. Now, Madame X was notorious, amongst other things, for the fact that the strap of her dress had slipped off her shoulder and Sargent had then repainted it. And when Anna Southall and I looked at Ena and Betty in the conservation studio at the Tate Gallery, all those years ago, it was obvious that he’d painted Betty’s dress, the red dress, in the same way, with a strap slipped off, and then put it back on her shoulder. So, clearly, Madam X underpins, if you like, very much the style of this portrait in terms of how Betty is represented. And then Ena is this, like, force of nature next to her, this very dramatic person. This painting, “A Vele Gonfie,” is also a painting of Ena, also made in Sargent’s studio. The story is that she came into the studio and was talking about how annoyed she was at how long Sargent was taking to make the painting. And she picked up, from the vast array of costumes and outfits that Sargent had in his studio at Tite Street, a cape, and flung it around herself. Now, it is the cape that belongs to the order of the garter. In other words, not only is it a man’s cape, but is a cape of a man, a knight, of the order of the garter.

And, in order for it to seem as if it’s flowing around her, Sargent encouraged her to put a stick through the cape. And you can just about see the broomstick that is in the painting. You can just about see it protruding from the cape. Not only was she wearing a cape that was to do with the order of the garter, she’s also wearing the headgear that is part of that, with that white cockade. So, it’s a completely transgressive painting in which she adopts, not only a male costume, but a costume of the upper orders of the British upper classes. When this painting was shown at the Royal Academy, in 2005, the companion piece was Sargent’s portrait of the Marlborough family. The duchess of Marlborough was, of course, Consuelo Vanderbilt. And Marlborough was wearing this cape, which he was entitled to, because he was a knight of the order of the garter. Of course, Ena was not. So, another amazingly transgressive and strange aspect, I think, of this painting was that Asher liked it so much that he gave it to Ena as a wedding gift. It’s an amazing painting cause it’s so unconventional and so breaks the general rules for the painting of an upper class woman. And he gave it to Ena as a wedding gift and she promptly sold it to raise funds for the art gallery that she was founding. So, she was a very remarkable and special person. And here, I found this photograph, in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. Here you see Ena’s wedding photograph with her little nephews and cousins and nieces around her, many of them with that wonderful bored look that children have in this kind of situation, where they’ve been hanging round, smartly dressed, for far too long. And Ena, herself, who is already 30 years old by this point, looking resplendent in her bridal outfit.

And her husband was the man you see on the right of the screen, Robert Moritz Mathias. And that is also a portrait by Sargent, and it also belongs to the Tate, but it’s never on view, I think. And he, as you see, he’s holding a cigarette. It’s all a aspect of that caricature that I showed earlier. His one hand resting on his leg. And he had married a really quite extraordinary woman. Both Ena and Betty actually studied art at the Slade School of Art. And then Ena established this gallery, which was called the Claridge Gallery, and was in Brook Street. And I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find out very much about it. I assume, because it was called the Claridge Gallery, that it was either in the Claridge’s Hotel, or very close to it. And she showed a range of contemporary British artists there. She was also a hostess of some renown and a very big supporter of the arts, in particular, she was a supporter of, for instance, the Ballets Russes. So, she was completely unconventional, out of the ordinary sort of a person. Now, the thing about Sargent, I think, was that he was very much drawn to different types, whether they were Spanish, Spanish dancers, Venetian people in the back alley of Venice, people in Capri, other people he met on his travels, and they were types.

But when it came to the Wertheimer family, they were not types. They were people that he knew extremely well, people that he had become very close to and very attached to. And yet, of course, they shared something of what drew him to these types. He found Jewish women, in general perhaps, but specifically the Wertheimer women, to be more animated, more lively than their English counterparts. And he’s quoted as saying that. And, I think, he would never have painted the series of paintings of the Wertheimers if he hadn’t been very fond of them. I think the issue that Wertheimer could afford to, constantly, ask Sargent to paint over and over again, members of his family, is neither here nor there, because, actually, Wertheimer was extremely wealthy at this point. And I don’t think that is really the question. But the various members of the family were painted in various different groupings. Here are three of the younger members of the family, Ruby, the eldest one, Essie the left of the painting, and Ferdinand. And I think that they were painted not in Sargent’s studio, but, actually, in the school room for these children. You can see the globe behind. And that leads me just to say a word about where the Wertheimers lived. The younger, the older children, I beg your pardon, were born when the Wertheimers were living at 21 Cornwall Terrace, which is the fabulous Regency Terrace that overlooks Regents Park, designed by Decimus Burton. And when these houses on this terrace come up for sale, which they do from time to time, including one at the moment, it appears that they have seven bedrooms. And, because there were so many members of the Wertheimer family, seven bedrooms was, increasingly, not enough.

So, in about 1885 or 1886, before the birth of Almina, whom I’ll talk about in just a moment, the family moved to 8 Connaught Place, an equally desirable setting, right on the edge of Hyde Park, on the northeast corner of Hyde Park, very close to Marble Arch. And, although, now, those buildings are all divided up into flats and offices and so on, when they were entire buildings, there were over five floors, five stories, and had a basement. So, they were enormous. And, clearly, the various rooms themselves were of very substantial proportions. So, if you think back to that image I showed you, so long ago, of, excuse me… of the… Of the pictures in Tate Britain and how big they were, you’ll be aware of how substantial the dining room must have been. And here is one of those paintings that was in the dining room at 8 Connaught Place, Ruby, Essie, and Ferdinand. Now, on the other side of this image, is an image of Mrs. Carl Meyer, whom Sargent painted two years before be began the Wertheimer portraits, in 1896. And Mrs. Meyer is shown with her two children. Incidentally, she has even longer pearls than Mrs. Wertheimer in the first portrait. And they had strings of pearls that went right down to their feet, in this case, like a skipping rope, almost. Sorry about that interfering in the background. But when this portrait was shown, the children were discussed as if they were over civilised orientals. And, I think, something of that criticism was also there in the painting of Ruby, Essie, and Ferdinand.

These do not look like English children with their black hair, their rosy cheeks. And the whole point of this concept of oriental was that Jews, as well as all sorts of other people, Greek, even Arab, anything other. And, of course, the word itself, oriental, is the opposite of occidental, it is the other. So, Sargent’s portraits, stress and, really, emphasise the otherness of this family and the children. The project of painting the Wertheimers was the largest, single project that Sargent did of a family. So, the fact of the Wertheimer paintings existing at all is remarkable, but that there are so many of them is even more remarkable of these large paintings. And they were also very odd, in their position. They’re not, exactly, family portraits only, because although, at one level, they were private, at another level, they were always public paintings, they were shown, not all of them were shown, but most of them were shown, at the Royal Academy, and they were also shown in other exhibitions. So, there was always that public side to them, right from the beginning. The two images, the silver wedding images of Asher and Flora, were shown in 1898 at the Royal Academy, for instance. And Sargent was so prominent amongst artists working in England at that time that reviews, for instance, in “The Times” almost, inevitably, started by discussing the works of Mr. Sargent.

So, the paintings were not unknown, they were not, in any way, simply a record of a particular family. They were semi-public, one could say. And they vary very much. There are two portraits, that I’m not showing, of the two male members of the family who both died in 1902, Alfred and Edward. And they, I think, are quite conventional. But now, we go back to Hilda, who is here on the left. Hilda was the third, excuse me one second. Hilda was the third surviving daughter of the family. And here she’s shown in what, at first glance, could be thought of as, really, quite a conventional Sargent portrait. She’s standing in a rather beautiful ball gown showing, to full effect, Sargent’s ability to paint fabric, and so on. But I think, obviously, because Hilda was, clearly, very, very shortsighted, she insisted on wearing her pince-nez for this portrait. And you don’t really see that very often, that they’re wearing a ball gown and they’re wearing spectacles or something. And there she is. And here she is again, on the right-hand screen. On the right-hand screen, she’s wearing her spectacles and she’s in this country setting. It’s not really clear what country setting this is, probably, I think, not a country setting at all, just, sort of, fantasy, evoking Grand Manner portraiture of the 18th century, which often showed figures in a country house setting. But here, you have Hilda, Conway, and Almina.

And Hilda wears her spectacles and she holds one of the family’s many, many dogs, a Jack Russell. And behind her, Conway holds a Spaniel. I think Conway’s quite nice to look at because Conway was a barrister and he looks so modern. You could actually imagine somebody like this walking down the street, today. And then next to Conway, Almina, holding a riding crop and looking distinctly uncountrified, as, in fact, they all do. Now, the last of the paintings in the series was this one, and this is the painting of Almina. It dates from 1908. And in 1907, Sargent had declared that he really was finished with painting portraits. He wanted to give up painting portraits. Nonetheless, he painted this portrait of Almina. And, I just want to get that, move that away. And she’s shown, again, as the painting of Ena, “A Vele Gonfie,” was very transgressive, this is even more so. Almina has chosen to be depicted as an oriental. She is wearing a costume with an elaborate turban and the flowing robes of, perhaps, a Persian, a Persian man, because it is a male costume that she’s wearing. So, once again, there’s this element of transvestism, which enables the sitter to be so transgressive. She’s holding an instrument from North India, which is called sarod, S-A-R-O-D. And, in my article, in “The Jew in the Text,” I thought, wrongly, that this instrument had to be played upright. But that’s not true at all. You can hold it like a guitar, as she’s vaguely holding it. It’s a fretless instrument and you play it by using a plectrum in one hand and plucking the strings with your fingernails in the other. Almina’s not shown playing it. She’s shown just holding it.

Now, Almina was 12 years old when Sargent first became part, almost, of the Wertheimer family. And, in this painting, she’s 22. She had a long knowledge of Mr. Sargent, he was a close friend. And in the painting, she completely breaks with that idea of the oriental princess, as somebody who is gazed upon, but is very passive. She is not the figure of fantasy of the harem, or the seraglio. She’s not like de Lacroix’s figures or Renoir’s figures, or of oriental fantasy. She has taken that stereotype and made it something different in confronting it and changing the dress to male costume and being so much part of the process of creation. She is not just the passive sitter, she is a collaborator with Sargent in the painting of this portrait, of this remarkable portrait. The portrait was, as you saw in the images of Tate Britain, a little smaller than the others, but not substantially so. It shows Sargent’s wonderful ability, again, to paint fabric. But in the foreground, it has absolutely exquisite, still life, with pieces of melon, which do show her exoticism at at some level, but also show Sargent’s wonderful ability as a painter. Now… moving on from this, in 1916, Sargent, sorry… In 1916, Asher Wertheimer declared that he was going to leave the paintings of the Wertheimer family as a bequest for “the benefit of the nation.” The nation was not, in 1916, totally overwhelmed by this. And neither was it overwhelmed two years later when Asher died. In fact, when Asher died in 1918, Britain was at the height of anti-German feeling, obviously, at the end of the First World War. But to the extent that the two remaining Wertheimer sons, Conway and Ferdinand, in 1918, both changed their names and dropped the name Wertheimer and made the extraordinary decision, I think, Conway decided to call himself Conway Conway. So, Conway became his last name.

And Ferdinand chose to call himself Bob Conway. So, to completely lose both the Germanness of the name and, obviously, in Bob Conway, to create a name that is also very un-Jewish, if you like. Now, it appears, to me, that Mrs. Wertheimer kept calling herself Mrs. Wertheimer and she died in 1922. At the time that this happened, the paintings, or the bequests, that Asher had made came into being. So, early in 1923, the paintings went to the National Gallery because there was no other venue for them. And this is a moment where anti-Semitic feeling really rears its head. And I want to read you a quote from Hansard, the proceedings of Parliament, of course. A quote from Hansard, on the 8th of March, 1923. The member of parliament for Oxford University and the Chichele professor of modern history, sir Charles William Chadwick Oman, said, “Can the right honourable gentleman, the chancellor of the exchequer, Stanley Baldwin, manage that these clever, but extremely repulsive pictures, should be placed in a special chamber of horrors and not between the brilliant examples of the art of Turner.” I mean, that is so blatantly anti-Semitic and you can see it being delivered with the sneer and the smirk, which we are so familiar with amongst parliamentarians, today, some parliamentarians, today. And, in fact, in spite of that, the records show that when the paintings were shown at the National Gallery, in 1923, they were extremely popular and crowds absolutely flocked to see them, as great as the large crowds, as those that went to see Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” which was massively popular, and is about to return to the National Gallery from the Huntington, I think, sometimes later this month, actually.

So, the paintings were very popular, but they were shown, when they first appeared at the National Gallery, amongst examples of work by portraitists like Lawrence, Gainsborough, Lely, and so on. In 1926, the paintings moved to what is now the site of Tate Britain, but was then called the National Gallery of British Art, and to a specific room funded by sir Joseph Duveen, of course, like Wertheimer, an extremely eminent dealer, called the Sargent Room. But the Sargent Room included, not only the Wertheimer pictures, but other paintings by Sargent, that belong to the gallery, now, like “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.” And in these intervening years between 1923 and 1926, Conway, now Conway Conway, wrote to the keeper of the National Gallery saying that it had been his father’s desire that the paintings were shown as a group, but they weren’t. And the keeper of the National Gallery, Henry Collins Baker, wrote back to Conway Conway that, quote, “The very exceptional procedure, after devoting one room to the series of portraits,” and quote, again, “Given rise to a considerable amount of antagonistic feeling and criticism in certain artistic circles.” Maybe not so much artistic as general circles. And so, the paintings were shown with other work. And I think, gradually, over the decades, they came off the walls and were not shown anymore at all.

And so, when these paintings were actually put on the walls, in November last year, this is the part of the wall panel accompanying them, the beginning of it. “This display brings together portraits from the Wertheimer bequest by John Singer Sargent. This is the first time the Wertheimer portraits are being shown as a standalone group at Tate, almost 100 years since they first went into the public domain. And we can speculate as to why that was, and try and work it out for ourselves, what the reason for that was. But they are an extraordinary group, painted over 10 years, and as I said, the biggest collection of paintings by Sargent of one family, that exists, The two remaining portraits, the one I’ve mentioned in New Orleans, and the other one in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, constitute the 12 that is that cluster. And I will leave it here, now, and invite questions and answers and responses. I’ll try to answer, all right?

• First of all, Kathy, it’s truly gold here. I want to thank you for an absolutely fascinating presentation. And would you like to read out the questions yourself or would you like us to do it?

• I think I’ll ask Lauren to do it.

• Lauren?

Q&A and Comments:

Q: - [Lauren] Happy to read the questions. Great, our first question is from Romaine who’s asking, "Both Wertheimer’s paintings seem to indicate a snobism, the artist of the subjects, or am I incorrect?”

A: - Sorry, that the paintings are a snobism of whom? Who is the snob?

Q: - [Lauren] It sounds like the artist is possibly snobbish towards the subject, but I could be interpreting that incorrectly.

A: - No, no, okay, okay, I get it. No, I don’t actually think that at all. I don’t think Sargent was snobbish about them at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Although the portrait of Asher does contain elements that you could say are elements of anti-Semitic caricature, I think he was extremely fond of them and not snobbish about them. In fact, I think the reason that he felt so comfortable with them, and went there, you know, week in and week out, was because he, himself, was a bit of a square peg in a round hole in English society because Sargent, who is four years older than Wertheimer, of course, was born in Florence, and he lived in Europe for the first years of his life. Although he was American, he hadn’t been to America. He was a European, trundled around by his family to Italy to the spas of Europe. And then he studied in Paris. He was multilingual, extremely cultured, a brilliant musician. And I think he felt that the Wertheimers were kindred spirits. They would never, that family, have been accepted amongst aristocratic, or upper class, English families. They were too outgoing, too flamboyant, too, I guess, too excessive. And the whole language of anti-Semitism is a language about excessiveness. At the point when Sargent was making these paintings, there’s a great deal of discussion about Jewish immigration to London, but particularly to the East End, of Jews from Lithuania and so on.

And the language of that discussion always harks on excess. They were excessive, they had excessively large families, they were excessive in all sorts of ways. And it was also the classic language of anti-immigrant discourse. There was too many of them, they took our jobs, they ate funny food, they spoke funny languages, they had too many children. Now the Wertheimers, in the extreme comfort and wealth in which they lived, were removed from that. But there’s no reason, at all, not to feel that they also were regarded as being excessive. And that the gift of so many paintings also seemed to be as totally excessive, totally over the top. One Wertheimer maybe, nine and then, finally, 10 Wertheimers, too much. And I also think that’s the reason, not snobbishness on Sargent’s part, at all. But I also think that that’s the reason why there’s been that almost 100 year gap until the paintings have actually been shown together. So, I hope that, in some way, addresses it. I don’t think Sargent was a snob about them at all.

• Right, next question.

• Do we have any others?

Q: - Yeah, there are quite a few. Michael is asking, “Could you please tell us how the English Wertheimers were descended from the original Sampson Wertheimer who died in 1724, in Vienna?”

A: - Okay, so I know Trudy’s talked about this, and I’m not going to attempt even to recreate this family tree, but yes, it goes back a very long way. And also the name Sampson, which was the name of Asher’s father, is very traditional in the family. And it goes back to this long lineage of art dealers and, of course, also of the chief rabbi of Hungary, a very long and very distinguished lineage. But I’m not going to attempt to reproduce that here. But, Asher is a direct descendant of all those other earlier Wertheimers. Another one.

Q: - [Lauren] Monty is wondering if there are still Jewish Wertheimers, today.

A: - Well, yes, there must be because they all had numerous children. When the painting “A Vele Gonfie” was not yet in the Tate Gallery, the conservator Anna Southall, I mentioned, she and I went on a road trip to visit that family, the Mathias family, who were living in Lincolnshire, and saw the painting there. And then it was given to Tate the year after. But I haven’t really had an opportunity to explore the question of descendants, although there, undoubtedly, are descendants from the various members of the family, and it will be at the level of great-grandchildren, by this point. It’s something for future work, which I haven’t done yet. Do we have anything else?

Q: - [Lauren] Yes, Bobby’s asking, “In Betty and Ena’s portrait, Ena’s dress is strapless. Wouldn’t that have also generated the ire of the critics?”

• That it’s satin? Sorry, that her dress is satin, did you say?

  • Strapless.
  • No.
  • Strapless, without straps.

A: - It isn’t strapless, it’s got straps. It wouldn’t have stayed up otherwise. It has straps and it’s Ena not Ina. It was Helena, Ena. No, it has straps and one strap is secured by a broach. And, of course, Betty’s dress also has straps, but what it is, is very unstructured. It’s a very un-corset-like dress, very loose, flowing dress. It’s almost like, it’s almost a predecessor of the flapper style of much later, I think. But it’s certainly not a strapless dress. She was not conservative, but she wasn’t that unconservative.

Q: - [Lauren] Thank you. Betty is asking, “How did the two brothers die in 1902? Did they die together in an accident?”

A: - 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.

Q: - [Lauren] Ethel is wondering if you can recommend a biography of Sargent.

A: - 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.

• Thank you.

• And one last one, maybe?

Q: - [Lauren] Sure, and I think this one is relevant. Ronald is asking if the paintings are still being shown at the Tate.

A: - Oh yes, but they only were put up in November of last year. So, they’re certainly on view, now. So, if you have the opportunity to go to Tate Britain, they will be on view, I’m sure for many months, now, having just, you know, for once, finally, have made it to the walls of Tate Britain. They very, very definitely are on view, now.

• [Lauren] Well, I know that that’s all you have time for, Kathleen. So, thank you so much-

Q: - And can I just come in and echo, also, my thanks? Can I ask you just one more question, if you don’t mind? Kathy, are any of the descendants still Jewish? I think that was the point.

A: - Well, that’s a good question. Hilda married out. She married a man called… I was going to say that, but I didn’t get round to it. She married a man called Henry Wilson Young and people had to get a special licence for a Christian to marry out, to marry a Jew. Some of them married Jews. And whether their descendants still practise as Jews, I really couldn’t say. Certainly, not the family of the Mathias family, I think, had long given up on Judaism. But, in any case, I think the Wertheimers were very characteristically, Ashkenazi, German Jews, even though they were born in Britain, that they were very secular Jews, in any case. And that’s why I like the fantasy of at least sticking to the ritual of the Friday night.

• Mm, mm.

• I think that was probably about it, actually.

• I think that’s quite-

• Some marry in synagogues. I mean, the picture I showed of Ena, the wedding picture, she did get married in a synagogue. But whether her children continued to be Jewish, I really couldn’t say.

• It’s fascinating the lure of the outside world. Kathy, again, let me thank you. That was absolutely splendid. You had a vast audience tonight and it was brilliant.

• Thank you so much.

• So, I wish everybody pleasant evening, wherever they are. In London, it’s dark. I don’t know, some of you are in LA, and all the rest of it. So, again, thank you so much, Kathy. And, Lauren, thanks, as ever, for being such a help.

• Thanks everybody, and thank you very much for listening.

• Good night.

• Good night.