A New View of John Singer Sargent's American Socialites

New York Times

22-05-2025

A group of beautiful, prominent American women from the Gilded Age are gathering in the same room for the first time this month at Kenwood House, a sprawling estate-turned-museum in London.
They're part of a new exhibition in honor of the 100th anniversary of the death of John Singer Sargent, a leading portraitist of his time. The show, 'Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits,' which runs through Oct. 5, features 16 high-society women across eight lavish oil paintings and 10 charcoal drawings dated between 1884 and 1923.
Sargent's subjects were part of a wave of wealthy American women who married into upper-class British families, infusing new money in return for status in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
British society was not always welcoming to these women as they tried to get used to drafty old houses and stiff manners. In the United States, they faced resentment for transferring wealth out of the country and into English society.
'They were pilloried on both sides of the Atlantic,' Wendy Monkhouse, the show's curator, said.
Because of their status in high society — not to mention their beauty and wealth — American socialites became known in the press as 'dollar princesses,' a tabloid-friendly moniker that persists to this day in histories of the period.
But these women — many of whom went on to make permanent marks on British society — were more than voiceless brides or human equivalents of a line of credit.
There was a myth that these women 'sold themselves for a title and lived unhappily ever after,' Monkhouse said. She said she wanted to ask if that myth held up. 'Guess what? Of course it doesn't,' she said.
She decided against using the phrase 'dollar princess' in the exhibition title, hoping to focus on the women's inner lives and accomplishments rather than just on the splendor visible in Sargent's paintings.
'It goes to the heart of women as commodities,' Monkhouse said. 'We're trying to say: 'Let's just stop objectifying these people.''
Sargent's subjects often had a lot of influence behind the scenes, bringing prominent people into their homes and spending time in powerful business and political circles.
Nancy Astor, for example, became the first woman to take a seat in the British Parliament, where she served for more than 25 years. She was born in Virginia in 1879. After an unhappy first marriage in the United States, she was onboard a cruise liner when she met Waldorf Astor, an American-born newspaper magnate and politician who lived in Britain. They married in 1904.
Astor is featured twice in the exhibition: once in a large 1908 oil painting, in which she looks girlish, dressed in a silk gown, and later in a 1923 charcoal portrait in which she looks older and more professional in a hat, with a quizzical look on her face. The images track her evolution from wealthy heiress to accomplished politician, Monkhouse said.
The show also features a charcoal portrait of Conseulo Vanderbilt, who in 1906 married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, in a union that had been forced upon her by her mother. (The wedding made the front page of The New York Times on Nov. 7, 1895.)
Vanderbilt wrote a memoir — 'The Glitter and the Gold,' published in 1932 — becoming one of the only women in her position to take control of her own narrative.
'My eyes, swollen with tears I had wept, required copious sponging before I could face the curious stares that always greet a bride,' she wrote in the memoir of her wedding day. The unhappy marriage ended in divorce.
In 1921, Vanderbilt married again, this time to the French aviator Jacques Balsan. The couple moved to Paris, where she established herself among high society and got involved with charity work.
'Her life isn't tragic,' Monkhouse said. 'She has a very successful second act.'
Sargent himself knew something about penetrating the upper classes in Europe. Born to American parents in Italy in 1856, he never lived in the United States full-time. Before moving to London in 1886, he spent his early career in Paris, where he painted the artists and writers who were part of the city's elite.
The Metropolitan Museum exhibition 'Sargent and Paris,' running through Aug. 3, tells the story of his time there, and features his famous painting 'Madame X,' a portrait of the Parisian socialite and American expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau.
The period in which Sargent worked still speaks to the imagination, including in popular culture. The third season of HBO's 'The Gilded Age' which is set in the era, is set to premiere next month, as is the second season of another 19th-century set drama, 'The Buccaneers,' on Apple TV+.
'Impoverished British aristocracy looking to rich young ladies of new money in the U.S.? That's the whole story of 'Downton Abbey,'' said Erica Hirshler, the senior curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Boston museum contributed an oil painting of Lady Edith Playfair, wearing a gold and black dress, to the Kenwood House exhibition. Lady Playfair was born into the wealthy Boston-based Russell family, which earned its fortune trading silk, tea and opium with China in the 19th century and buying Boston real estate. Unlike some of her contemporaries, her marriage to a British baron seemed to be a happy one, Hirshler said.
Having all these portraits in one place, with information about their subjects' lives, humanizes these women and shows that they were more than just 'dollar princesses,' she said. 'It's really a wonderful opportunity to meet these people as people.'