Margaret “Daisy” Leiter was just 19 when in 1898 she was painted by the most celebrated society portraitist of the age, John Singer Sargent. Leiter, the youngest daughter of an American retail magnate, was a celebrated beauty who was said to have “the loveliest eyes in Washington”.
Sargent’s resulting portrait, in which Leiter stands full length, exuberantly swathed in fabric, radiates with the monied self-assurance of a young woman fully aware of her own social power.
Her confidence was not misplaced. Six years later, after her older sister Mary had married Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, Daisy also bagged herself a British aristocrat in Henry Howard, Earl of Suffolk. He was known to have cashflow problems; happily the new Countess of Suffolk could help.
Leiter was not the only wealthy American heiress to cross the Atlantic to marry into high society – nor the only one to be painted by Sargent. Marking the centenary of his death in 1925, an exhibition at Kenwood in London will feature 18 of Sargent’s portraits of the women once sneeringly referred to as “dollar princesses”.
They include his paintings of Edith, Lady Playfair (1884), formerly the Boston heiress Edith Russell, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Mrs Joseph Chamberlain (1904), the former Mary Crowninshield Endicott of Massachusetts, which has been loaned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Sargent, himself an expat American, was prolific but also very expensive, meaning he was particularly favoured by the US and European elite. The Brooklyn native Jennie Jerome, who became Lady Spencer-Churchill, mother of Winston, sat for Sargent, as did Viscountess Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in Westminster, who began life as Nancy Witcher Langhorne in Danville, Virginia.
Given the arresting character of many of Sargent’s portraits of American society wives, it is a surprise they have never before been exhibited together, said Wendy Monkhouse, the curator for English Heritage, which looks after Kenwood.
“I realised these women have been languishing behind the ‘dollar princess’ stereotype for 100 years, and it was time to take it to pieces,” she said. “Even though these women were extremely wealthy and married into the aristocracy, there is actually very little known about them today. So we’ve done a lot of original research into their lives [to highlight] what they achieved, how the painting fits into their life story. We have looked at their husbands, their lovers, their children, their houses and really tried to flesh them out.
“There’s a subtle, or not so subtle, misogyny in all of the descriptions of the women on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, they are resented because they’re taking money from America. In Britain, they’re resented because they are scooping up the British aristocracy and thereby reducing the marriage pool for the female British aristocracy.”
While the women would doubtless have resented being bundled together, Monkhouse said, she believes Sargent has given his American heiress sitters some common characteristics.
“I think they do look out at you with all the confidence of bright and intelligent and quick-witted women. But then again – and this is the magic – they’re being painted by Sargent in a way that looks back at Gainsborough and Reynolds and other great British portraitists, to make them look as though they belong in the homes that they were going to hang in.
“So you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re getting what was perceived as an American candour and confidence, but in the dress and the context of a British aristocratic portrait.”
• Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits is at Kenwood House, London, from 16 May to 5 October
