Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize 2026
Shortlisted for Apollo Magazine's Book of the Year 2025
'A deeply informed, acutely sensitive cultural history.'
Kirkus Reviews, one of their Best Arts Books of 2024
'A nuanced portrait of a world in flux.'
Publishers Weekly
'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
'Strouse's book is not only a useful addition to Sargent studies, it adds a fascinating subtext to our awareness of the evolution of 19th- and 20th-century English social history.'
Peyton Skipwith, Literary Review
'A book as finely crafted as the portraits it describes, tells a story both specific and universal - about the yearnings for recognition and the tenuous rewards of achieving it.'
Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
'Strouse confronts prejudice unblinkingly but with a historian's grace'
Walker Mimms, The New York Times
'Yet Strouse's account of their relation is not simply a chronicle of artistic patronage. As the title of Family Romance implies, something like friendship, too, was in the air when Sargent painted the Wertheimers.'
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The New York Review of Books
'Family Romance is beautifully and generously illustrated'
The Boston Globe
'One ends it very grateful to have learned more about this extraordinary and engaging family and of the important part it played in Sargent's life and career.'
Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement
'Strouse effortlessly tackles the challenge of combining the artist's biography with biographies of his various sitters, allowing the readers to become excited participants in the game of figuring out what was behind these relationships.'
Christoph Irmscher, The Art Newspaper
'[A] book that 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.'
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, author of Virginia Woolf
'Jean Strouse, a first-rate biographer, has fought through Sargent's hieroglyphic handwriting to boost our knowledge of the his unusual friendship with the extraordinary Wertheimer family. In uncovering more of this artistic Jewish family's history, Strouse has pursued a riveting detective story reminiscent of Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes, revealing fascinating and colourful histories and characters previously little known. Strouse's Family Romance is a great read for anyone who loves Sargent and the glittering social circles in which he voyaged.'
Paul Fisher, author of The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent and His World
'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, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Cole
