Portrait of Margaret Leiter (later Margaret, Countess of Suffolk) by John Singer Sargent
An upcoming exhibition at one of London’s manor houses will delve into the fascinating history of the American portraitist John Singer Sargent and his relationship with the American socialites known as the “dollar princesses”.
Starting around the mid-nineteenth century, it became common for the daughters of wealthy American families to marry British aristocrats. These British lords would get the cash they needed, while the Americans would gain prestige in return. The most famous of these dollar princesses, as they came to be known, include Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895, and Jeannette Jerome, who married the Duke’s uncle Lord Randolph Churchill. This union resulted in the birth of a son, Winston, in 1874. John Singer Sargent became known for his portraits of high-society women in the 1880s. Though much of his other work shows signs of Impressionism, Sargent’s portraiture is far more conservative, drawing on eighteenth-century British masters like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.
In honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, Kenwood House, a London manor home and museum bordering Hempstead Heath, will host an exhibition called Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits. The exhibition’s centerpiece will likely be Sargent’s portrait of Margaret Leiter, part of Kenwood House’s permanent collection. Sargent created the painting in 1898 when the sitter was 19 years old. A few years later, Margaret would marry Charles Howard, Earl of Suffolk. The portrait is part of the Suffolk Collection at Kenwood House, gifted to the British nation by the Howard family in 1994. Heiress will also include the portrait of Mary Endicott (wife of politician Joseph Chamberlain and stepmother to future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), as well as the portrait of Edith Russell, who married Lord Lyon Playfair (a chemist and politician who helped found the Royal College of Science). Eighteen of Sargent’s portraits in total will be on display, some of which are loans from American institutions like the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Writing for the Guardian, Esther Addley remarks that these Sargent portraits have never really been exhibited together under the dollar princess unifier. Wendy Monkhouse, a curator for English Heritage, stated that the title of ‘dollar princess’ was derisively given to these women by British aristocrats, and the stereotypes surrounding this image may need to be explored and dismantled. According to Monkhouse, these women were “extremely wealthy and married into the aristocracy, [but] there is actually very little known about them today.” Much of this has to do with the misogyny of decades and centuries past, where little attention was paid to the lives, accomplishments, and passions of women married to prominent men. Even their names are sometimes erased, with the Endicott portrait still often known as Portrait of Mrs. Joseph Chamberlain. The Kenwood exhibition will present new research into these women, their lives, achievements, and the place their portraits have in their stories.
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits will open at Kenwood House starting May 16th and run through October 5th.