Official Website of Author Jean Strouse
Coming November, 2024
Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career – and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
Advance Praise
“A riveting book about an amazing vanished world, a remarkable family and a great and mysterious artist, told with energy and vividness and sharp humour, full of extraordinary characters, some dubious, some shocking, some tragic, and sweeping with speed and brio over a great arc of time. No one could tell this story better, and what a story it is!”
Hermione Lee
“Family Romance belongs to that august line of panoramic social histories with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, and, as the chronicle of an aristocracy in decline, with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Jean Strouse is one of our subtlest biographers, and she shares John Singer Sargent’s eye for the exquisitely telling detail that illuminates not only a character but an age.”
Judith Thurman
“A society in transition, an elusive painter in his prime, and an Anglo-Jewish dynasty with aristocratic habits: All the elements are here for a rich drama. Jean Strouse delivers, prismatically pairing art and life, illuminating corners of brilliant privilege and dark prejudice, inviting us to peer, over John Singer Sargent’s shoulder, into Gilded Age drawing rooms. Stylish, sumptuous, and a joy to read.”
Stacy Schiff
Upcoming Events
October 27, 2024
Detroit Jewish Book Fair and Detroit Institute of Arts
Conversation with Ben Coleman
5200 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202 (DIA Museum)
Time: 1:00 p.m.
November 13, 2024
Wellesley Authors on Stage
106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02482
Time: 9:30 a.m. coffee, 10:30 a.m. program
November 19, 2024
New York Public Library, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
Conversation with Hernan Diaz
476 Fifth Avenue, New York 10018
Time: 6:00 p.m.