The Pen and the Brush | Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is a scholar of the novel whose work has focused more on the visual arts than the average literary critic’s. She has written for The New York Review not only about Austen, Dickens, and George Eliot, but also about Frans Hals, Vermeer, female self-portraitists, and, in our November 21, 2024, issue, John Singer Sargent. That essay, “Friend of the Family,” is a review of Jean Strouse’s Family Romance, a new book about Sargent’s complex relationship with the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimer family, whose patriarch, Asher, was an art dealer in London. Between 1896 and 1908, Sargent painted twelve portraits of various Wertheimers—the largest commission of his career. Yeazell writes that “by the time Sargent put the finishing touches on the picture of Almina”—the last of the bunch—“he had spent over a decade engaged in what he jokingly termed ‘chronic Wertheimerism.’” Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English at Yale, where she has taught since 1991. She is the author of six books: Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (1976), The Death …
