John Singer Sargent and Henry James: Painting and Prose in a Gilded Age

Jean Strouse and Madeleine Schwartz explored the art, literature, and an iconic friendship that defined a Gilded Age—and what it reveals about today.

Filmed on 11/04/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

John Singer Sargent and Henry James both spent formative years in Paris, then settled in London where they were neighbors and good friends. One working in paint, the other in prose, they vividly captured an era of dramatic social change, with the old aristocracy in steep decline as fresh energies and new wealth emerged. Join Sargent biographer Jean Strouse and journalist Madeleine Schwartz for a conversation on how being American shaped Sargent’s and James’ work, and how our current Gilded Age compares with the last one.

About the speakers:

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier and Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and served as Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. Her new book, Family Romance, John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, was published in 2024.

Madeleine Schwartz is editor in chief of The Dial, the award-winning magazine of international writing. She lives in Paris, where she writes about the rise of the far right, urban politics and art fraud. Her work appears in the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where she previously worked as an editor. She teaches journalism at Sciences Po.

This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world.

Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.