Official Website of Author Jean Strouse
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.
- Finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
- Named among “Best Books of 2024” by The New Yorker
- Named an “Editors’ Choice” by The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 28 and Dec. 29, 2024
- Picador paperback edition of Family Romance to be published October 11, 2025
“I read and shivered and tried, unsuccessfully, to think of other sub-three-hundred-page works of nonfiction that deserve to be called epic”
Jackson Arn, The New Yorker
“a book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes”
Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
“an absorbing, frequently tragic portrayal of [a] glittering, fragile epoch”
Charles Finch, The Boston Globe
“Family Romance shines when portraying the groundswells altering high society”
Walker Mimms, The New York Times
“Strouse’s feeling for these portraits is evident in her passionate descriptions of her encounters with them…. [a] beguiling and absorbing book”
Ruth Franklin, Harper’s
“Outstanding…[Family Romance] not only gives the Wertheimers their due, but helps to finish painting the picture of them that the master portraitist of their gilded age had left so tantalizingly incomplete”
Elroy Rosenberg, Tablet
Upcoming Events
January 22, 2026
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Conversation with Mona Simpson
10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Time: Time TK