There are few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel. It is at once lush and restrained. Betty de Rothschild’s glorious full pink skirt is set against a rich brown background; she wears pearls and a large ruby, but her pose is informal, her eyes thoughtful. Such paintings illuminate a moment when Jews entered European high society on new terms. They were no longer simply tolerated as the financiers and estate managers whose expertise, money and contacts facilitated the lifestyle of the old aristocracy. At last they could aspire to a different status: as near-equals whose wealth, intellect or artistic talent gave them access to previously closed social worlds.
Samson Wertheimer, a rabbi and financier who served as court factor to three Holy Roman Emperors in the early 1700s and was even known as the Judenkaiser, didn’t inspire great art; portraits of him exist, but they are pedestrian and by unknown artists. The Jews who figure in so many of Rembrandt’s greatest paintings are, with a single exception, not individuals but social types: the old Jew, the young Jew, the Jewish bride. So when the Rothschilds, the Cahen d’Anvers and the British Wertheimers commissioned portraits that showed them as individuals, they were not only indulging the impulse to preserve their faces for posterity, but revealing a sophisticated understanding of what art was and why it mattered.
In Britain, the end of the 19th century was marked by tumultuous economic upheaval, agricultural crisis and appalling poverty, but also by diversification in the social hierarchy. Constrained by social and economic forces, members of the old landowning families began to mingle with the families of ‘Randlords’, captains of industry and financiers. Sometimes they even married their daughters. Art dealers like the Wertheimers joined this composite elite. Dealing was a profession that rose dramatically in prestige precisely because the old families were losing money and new ones sought to acquire ‘the furniture of the great’. Prices were soaring. In 1882, Ferdinand de Rothschild instructed another Samson Wertheimer – a Jew from Fürth now settled in London – to spend six thousand pounds on Marie Antoinette’s writing table, which he purchased at Christie’s from the duke of Hamilton. As Edmond de Goncourt cattily noted at the end of the 1870s, the scrapmongers of yesteryear were now ‘gentlemen dressed by our tailors who buy and read books and have wives as distinguished as the wives in our own circles, gentlemen hosting dinners served by servants wearing white cravats’.
Less than 3 per cent of the very rich in Edwardian Britain (those leaving estates of more than £100,000) were Jews, but attacks on the ‘new plutocracy’ were often antisemitic in nature and to be Jewish attracted a particular opprobrium. This was certainly true in the art world, a sector that comprised other mercantile minorities, though none carried such a weight of prejudice as the much maligned Jewish dealer. This was also the Dreyfus moment, when vicious caricatures and sinister pen-portraits of Jews became ubiquitous. Yet it remained the task of the society portraitist to give wealth a human face. The results were ambiguous, and this tension is the subject of Jean Strouse’s book, a group biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.
John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ambivalence. Admirers saw him as an heir to Velázquez, Van Dyck, Manet and the great English portrait painters; dissenters thought his work shallow, commercial and derivative. He was, the critic Michael Kimmelman argued in 1999, ‘the gold standard during the Gilded Age. But he invented nothing; he changed nothing.’ As the chronicler of a world in flux, perhaps he did not need to. If turn-of-the-century Britain was a society, as Strouse writes, ‘precariously balanced between centuries, between tradition and modernity, between a past dominated by Europe and an indistinct American future, between longstanding social hierarchies and disruptive forces of new power and wealth’, then Sargent was – as Max Beerbohm commented – its ‘supreme interpreter’. That ability stemmed in part, Strouse suggests, from his peripatetic upbringing. Sargent was a certain kind of rootless American. Born in Italy, where he first learned to sketch and paint, he set foot in the US only at the age of twenty and spent most of his adult life in Europe. In short, he was himself a product of the new society, and was instinctively drawn to its more dynamic protagonists.
Sargent’s earliest work did not necessarily have these qualities. His 1882 painting of a flamenco dancer may have reminded admiring critics of Goya, but his 1884 portrait of ‘Madame X’, the American-born adventuress Virginie Gautreau, shocked Paris with its louche portrayal of the wife of a wealthy French banker, her naked shoulders and décolleté rendered scandalous by the thin loop of a strap falling down one arm. The ensuing furore propelled Sargent to London, where he really made his name, painting old and new money with varying levels of enthusiasm. Inevitably his subjects included Jews – mostly women, but also a few rich and powerful men. Chief among these works is his 1898 portrait of the British art dealer Asher Wertheimer. ‘Sargent has just completed another Jew,’ the historian Henry Adams told a friend when he saw it, ‘Wertheimer, a worse crucifixion than history tells us of.’
Adams was one of the nastiest antisemites among the American upper classes, but he was not the only contemporary to regard the portrait of Wertheimer this way. When the architect I.N. Phelps Stokes first saw it in Sargent’s studio, he described the figure as ‘pleasantly engaged in counting shekels’, a verdict that tells us more about the viewer than the sitter, since Wertheimer was doing nothing of the kind: he holds a cigar in his left hand while his right thumb sits in his trouser pocket. Polish Jews might have seen the US as the goldene medina, but social integration was in some ways easier in the old world.
Wertheimer was Sargent’s sixth painting of a Jewish subject; he would paint 29 more. Altogether, if we include his charcoal portraits, some seventy of his sitters were Jewish, around 5 per cent – not a particularly high proportion, but in keeping with the proportion of wealthy Jews in British society. Yet statistics do not tell the whole story: Wertheimer would become Sargent’s biggest private patron. The first commission was twin portraits of Asher and his wife, Flora. Dressed in an ivory gown with lace trim, Flora rests a hand on a Louis XV desk with ormolu mounts. Her pearls, Strouse notes, ‘seem to contain light’, although she dismisses the painting as a ‘study in tones and textures of white next to the rich darks of Asher’, and lacking its ‘vital force’: ‘Where Asher seems intensely alive, Flora looks beautiful but muted and still.’ Flora didn’t like the painting either – she worried it made her look ‘too rich’ – so in 1904 her husband commissioned another, a gloomy, austere painting that depicts a mother who has just lost her son.
Wertheimer was by now a weekly visitor to Sargent’s studio, and Sargent a regular guest at the family’s home in Connaught Place, near Hyde Park. Monet, who was introduced there by Sargent, thought it ‘quite extraordinary, a palace with some very beautiful things and a quite distinctive society, nothing but Jews, or almost, an infernal din and very relaxed manners despite a high degree of elegance, ten children, five daughters, three of them married and several quite beautiful’. The portrait of two of those daughters, Ena and Betty, is on the cover of Strouse’s book. ‘What do you think of it?’ Sargent asked an American who visited his studio in 1901. ‘Isn’t it stunning of the taller girl? Don’t you think she is handsome?’ Ena was a magnificent young woman, unusually tall with dark hair and a full figure. She is shown half-turning to the viewer, one arm casually flung around the waist of her more reserved younger sister. The painting is a rhapsody in crimson and white. A large Chinese vase and other works of art are visible in the background. The style and abandon of the sisters’ dresses deliberately invokes Sargent’s scandalous portrait of Virginie Gautreau. Yet there is nothing louche about their liveliness, a quality some observers connected with their Jewish origins. The critic and artist D.S. MacColl thought the figure of Ena had ‘a vitality hardly matched since Rubens, the race, the social type, the person’. It was, in its way, a compliment. The connotations attached to the belle Juive were always more alluring than those that clung to her male counterpart.
Strouse writes that when she first encountered the Wertheimer paintings on show together at the Seattle Art Museum in 2001, they seemed to her ‘familiar’. If Adams was inclined to dislike Jews, she is inclined to like them – more, certainly, than the English aristocrats Sargent painted, whom she describes in terms that make them appear unattractive and aloof (‘flat and stale’ in the case of Daisy Greville, countess of Warwick, a woman who was anything but). This opposition between ‘chilly aristocratic marionettes’ and ‘exuberant life forces’ shapes the book, as Strouse attempts to reclaim the humanity of her arriviste Jewish subjects for a 21st-century public. Who can fail to love Ena as she sweeps into Sargent’s studio, scarf and coat ‘in full sail’ (a vele gonfie) and, six feet tall, poses playfully in a feathered hat and cape that recall the Most Noble Order of the Garter?
In 1905, a year after Sargent painted Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie, Parliament passed the Aliens Act, a milestone in British immigration history, conceived to stem the large-scale influx of Jews fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe. Sargent did not read newspapers, but he must have understood what it meant to present A Vele Gonfie in the 1905 Royal Academy Exhibition, alongside The Marlborough Family and The Countess of Warwick and Her Son. The Graphic pronounced A Vele Gonfie ‘one of the most subtle and brilliant things Mr Sargent has ever achieved’. Punch depicted Sargent and Velázquez delivering their paintings (in Velázquez’s case, the Rokeby Venus) to the National Gallery as ‘Desirable Aliens’.
Ena, who once dreamed of becoming a painter, married into a family of Jewish industrialists and herself became a figure in the London art world. She opened a gallery on Brook Street in Mayfair, entertained Diaghilev and promoted artists including Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Fernand Léger and Raoul Dufy. But she made no money, and her husband, Robert Mathias, resented, as Strouse puts it, ‘how much the Ballets Russes dancers ate, Ena’s impetuous gift of the pearl necklace to Diaghilev, the haemorrhaging red ink of the dress shop’. The couple fought bitterly, never more than over Ena’s inexplicable decision to sell A Vele Gonfie to an American gallery. (After she died, Mathias went to great lengths to recover it.)
Life proved harder for the Wertheimer boys. At school they were subjected to antisemitic bullying. Alfred, the second son, didn’t take his degree at Cambridge but went to work as a chemist in East London. He wanted to become an actor, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. Sargent sought to mediate, warning Alfred, as he worked on his portrait, that Asher really did mean to cut him off if he took ‘a decisive step’ in that direction. London fell in love with Sargent’s 1901 painting of the ‘immaculate young Jew’, but Alfred, a morphine addict, continued to frustrate his father, borrowing money he did not return. He died of an overdose in South Africa. The eldest son, Edward, seemed more promising, keen to make his mark in the art world and on the family business. But he contracted typhoid after eating a bad oyster on his honeymoon. The brothers were buried side by side. Sargent’s portrait of Edward was never completed.
He did, however, produce two groupings of the younger Wertheimer children: Essie, Ruby and Ferdinand (known as Bob), seated informally at home in 1902; and Hylda, Almina and Conway, set outdoors in an arrangement that lacks spontaneity. He also painted Almina as a harem slave. The portrait plays with the 18th-century Orientalist tradition but gives it a knowing contemporary edge. Asher hung it in his morning room at Connaught Place, next to the dining room where eight others were on display. In 1922 he gave this group (nine of his twelve Sargents) to the nation.
‘These are more than a group of family portraits,’ the Times’s critic wrote in 1923, when the nine Wertheimers were exhibited together at the National Gallery. Illustrations of ‘an epoch and a set in that epoch’, it deemed them ‘documents which the historian will prize, and perhaps the satirist will not disdain to pick at’. Two years later, after Sargent died, an article in the paper added that they were ‘the only pictures by a living artist that have ever been exhibited’ at the National Gallery. Others had tried. In 1915, the gallery had rejected the offer of a painting by Walter Sickert, deeming him insufficiently ‘important’. Sickert didn’t forget the insult, suggesting – shortly after the Wertheimer display opened – that the gallery should show only the work of the dead: this, at least, was an uncontroversial distinction, and it would never do to leave the trustees ‘at the mercy of the wishes’ of future ‘testators’. The problem was it already had been. Everyone knew that when Asher handed over the portraits he had expressed the wish that they be shown together, in one room. This was quite a request. A whole room, dedicated not just to a contemporary painter, but a single family? Not aristocrats – a group whose history was deeply entwined with that of the nation – but Jews? The family’s German-Jewish name and foreign origins hardly recommended them to a public prone to anti-German rioting and gripped by the cataclysm of the Somme. Of course, Asher Wertheimer was a patriot. He invested heavily in war bonds. When he died in August 1918, the Times asserted (erroneously) that he had ‘always had the most undisguised hatred and contempt, professional and personal’ for Germany and the Germans. But by this time his sons Conway and Bob had changed their names; Wertheimers no more, they became Conway J. Conway and Bob Conway. Only Sargent’s portrait of Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer serves to recall their earlier identity.
In 1926, the Wertheimer paintings were transferred to the Tate, where they featured in a newly built Sargent room. Today, they live in a storage facility in London’s East End, in huge racks that are pulled out of their units on fixed rails. Strouse was lucky to see them together in Seattle. When Roger Fry reviewed the original 1923 exhibition, he dismissed them as ‘art applied to social requirements and social ambitions’, the product of a world in which ‘a rich man, if he have the intelligence of Sir Asher Wertheimer and the luck to meet a Sargent, can, by the latter’s professional skill, transmit his fame to posterity.’
Sargent’s work fell out of fashion in the 1920s. There were also practical difficulties. Joseph Duveen, another Jewish art dealer, attempted to resolve these when he funded the Sargent room, along with three other galleries intended for modern art by foreigners. In the 1960s, the Tate began to diversify the contents of the Sargent space, consigning most of the Wertheimers to the basement. Ena’s son, Anthony, wrote furious letters challenging what he saw as a ‘monstrous violation’, but in vain. It was an unrealistic expectation. Curatorial preferences change over time, collections grow, space remains at a premium. But there is a bigger story. Is it the story Strouse tells, structured by the pressing question ‘Who is England?’ – a story which has, after all, lost none of its urgency? Is it, as Fry thought, the story of an American painter helping a family of rich Jews join the ranks of the ‘upper ten thousand’, a term with purchase on both sides of the Atlantic? Or is it a story with many European parallels, about Jewish aspirations and Jewish generosity?
Again and again in this period we find Jews such as Duveen and the Wertheimers giving generously to great public museums as a way of staking their claim to the future of the nation. The Tate and the National Gallery benefited, but we might also think of Edmond de Rothschild’s vast bequest to the Louvre or James Simon’s gift of Nefertiti in Berlin. The aristocrats who customarily figure as subjects of the great portraits in the British artistic pantheon were rarely so generous. They had their own historic houses; their estates were entailed; they were increasingly short of money. Above all, they cared for their own posterity. The Rothschilds and the Wertheimers were more public-spirited. Yet such Jews were also regularly targeted for their avarice, materialism, cosmopolitan solidarities and clannishness. The stereotypes that dogged them have not gone away. We need to recognise their significance as cultivated men and women intoxicated by high culture, committed to their new countries and forced by their outsider status to think deeply about the meaning and symbols of citizenship.
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