The frustrated life of John Singer Sargent

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation. Some queried his generous gift on the frankly snobbish and anti-Semitic grounds that it was not for upstart Jewish businessmen to force their likenesses into a national collection. The Conservative MP Sir Charles Oman went so far as to say in the Commons that ‘these clever but extremely repulsive pictures should be placed in a special chamber of horrors and not between brilliant examples of the art of Turner’.

The Wertheimers were not merely Sargent’s patrons but also his friends, and in his absorbing new biography Paul Fisher persuasively argues that the painter had a particular affinity with those who, like himself, were cosmopolitan outsiders in British society or in other ways flouted convention.