Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers

“Jean Strouse is such a superb writer and she has won several prizes for her biographies of the American financier J.P. Morgan and Alice James, Henry James’s sister. So she’s super familiar with the territory of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which enabled her to create this beautiful background, then plug her characters in. Strouse creates both a vanished world and these wonderful characters who lived in it. And it’s a look at painting and art as Sargent practiced it. I love reading about all these things, so I loved this book.” Read more...

The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist

Mary Ann Gwinn, Journalist