Conversations from the Cullman Center: Family Romance: Jean Strouse with Hernan Diaz

Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family.

In commissioning a grand series of family portraits, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became John Singer Sargent’s greatest private patron and close friend. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at these twelve portraits—painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the lives of Sargent, his sitters, and their circles amidst the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age. Jean Strouse’s account illuminates a period of tumultuous social change that saw the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy, the dramatic rise of new wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, and the birth of the modern art market. Sargent brilliantly portrayed these transformations, in which the Wertheimers were key players, and Family Romance brings their interwoven stories to life for the first time.

Strouse will discuss her book with Pulitzer Prize–winner Hernan Diaz.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Architectural Digest, Newsweek, and other publications. Strouse has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017.

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times–bestselling author of Trust, which the New York Times named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century. His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. Diaz worked on Trust during his 2020-2021 Fellowship at the Cullman Center.
 

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