The Secrets Behind Sargent’s Intimate Portrait of a Jewish Family

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Karen Rosenberg

John Singer Sargent’s “Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children” (1896) is the focus of a show at the Jewish Museum. Credit Tate Britain

UNITED KINGDOM---This well-to-do, well-connected family of German Jewish origin — Mrs. Meyer; her Hamburg-born husband, Carl; and their two children — had just bought Shortgrove, a country estate in Essex that completed the Meyers’ real-estate portfolio and complemented their aristocratic aspirations. Some decades later, it entered the collection of Tate Britain as a bequest from Mrs. Meyer. Now it is in another appropriately aristocratic setting, the dining room of the former Warburg Mansion — now a gallery at the Jewish Museum — where it is the heart of the engrossing and intimate exhibition “John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children.” [link]