“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

“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