Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits , Kenwood House, Hampstead, until 5 October 2025.
The suspicion of girls digging for gold has always been good gossip but in the years 1870 to 1914 the situation was the reverse, with a hundred and two rich American fillies marrying into the British peerage, nabbing six Dukes and bringing with them forty million dollars – the equivalent of one billion pounds today – in exchange for the status that came from joining the often impoverished British aristocracy. Sargent, who was related to some of these ‘Dollar Princesses’, went to work with relish on their pretty faces, as these portraits at Kenwood show. They are divided between intimate charcoal portraits, of which he was a master, and some grand paintings in the manner of Velásquez and Gainsborough. On the centenary of his death, this is the first time all these girls in their glad rags have been brought together.
Before visitors get too excited by the sight of these ladies – some are quivering on the verge of marriage to ‘decayed and semi-drunken peers’, as Marie Corelli wrote in 1905 – a large notice from English Heritage warns of the perils of misogyny and the sin of ‘stereotyping’. Visitors are warned of the danger of seeing women lumped together as a unit, while ‘men are studied as individuals’. They are told that each of these women, ‘made an indelible contribution to the society they entered’. For English Heritage, this was certainly not about their desiring to get their hands on a house in Kensington and a castle in Scotland.
Yet it is striking, when they were not making an ‘indelible contribution’, just how many affairs and divorces these women had – behaviour that did not filter down to the rest of society until about the 1970s. New Yorker, Eloise, Countess of Ancaster, had a series of affairs including with Lord Londonderry before she returned his presents in a ‘great sack’. Marchioness Curzon of Alabama and Kedleston took two lovers, including Oswald Mosley, who also served all three of her stepdaughters. A surprising number of aristocratic husbands had the grace to die off. That notorious philanderer the Duke of Manchester expired at thirty-nine leaving his banjo-playing duchess from Louisiana free to enjoy her fortune. Neville Chamberlain’s stepmother from Massachusetts was widowed after only a few years of marriage. Daisy Leiter from Chicago lost her husband, the Earl of Suffolk, in the Great War, while Cora Smith from New Orleans, whose $10 million came from Colegate toothpaste, lost her second husband, the Earl of Strafford, when he mysteriously fell onto railway tracks at Potters Bar. She was derided for wearing her coronet the wrong way around at Edward VII’s coronation but managed a third husband, who she met at the Delhi Durbar of 1902. Unfortunately, her portrait doesn’t show us much of her teeth.
All the ladies look extremely interesting but the star of the show is Daisy, whose sister married Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. Her portrait is an ‘eight-footer’ that caused a sensation at the RA in 1898. A homage to Gainsborough and Reynolds, it is difficult to look at as there is so much cream satin on show. The most famous of the sitters is Lady Astor from Virginia, shown here in a large dynamic oil portrait from 1908 aged twenty-nine, hands behind her back like a naughty schoolgirl or the disruptive Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante by Romney. She met Waldorf Astor on a transatlantic liner and when they married, his father gave them Cliveden House and Nancy a Cartier tiara containing a fifty-five-carat diamond. But never let it be said that she or any of the glittering girls on these walls were mercenary.
The Sargent show is small, but Kenwood House is large and full of lovely paintings. There is a magnificent Rembrandt self-portrait in the dining room, once referred to by critic Jonathan Jones as ‘the greatest painting on show in Britain’. Other walls display Turner, Constable, Angelica Kauffman (or ‘Kauffperson’), and a spectacular Van Dyck from 1634 of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine with a black pageboy. This requires another warning in the Art Fund brochure. Black servants were ‘enslaved’ and her hand on his shoulder, which looks like affection, merely ‘emphasises his position as a possession’. Yet since slavery in Britain became illegal in 1569, the nearest thing you could find to slaves or ‘possessions’ would probably be married women, who could not legally own anything until the Property Acts of 1870/82 – just in time for a bold American heiress to try her luck in Britain.
