Oil paint on canvas
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-singer-sargent-475" aria-label="More by John Singer Sargent" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">John Singer Sargent</a>
Almina Daughter Asher Wertheimer
Presented by the widow and family of Asher Wertheimer in accordance with his wishes 1922
actions: postures and motions
adults
dress: fantasy/fancy
dress: nations/regions
exotic
Fachiri, Almina
fine arts and music
individuals: female
instrument, sarod
leisure and pastimes
Middle East
music
music and entertainment
named individuals
objects
people
portraits
sitting
society
Wertheimer, Almina
woman
<p>This painting was the last in the series of Sargent’s portraits of the Wertheimer family. Almina was Asher Wertheimer’s fifth daughter. She is shown in an exotic, ‘oriental’ costume, including an ivory-white Persian dress and a turban entwined with pearls. The white and green over-jacket was a studio prop and the musical instrument (the sarod from northern India) was owned by the artist. Such fantasy images of European women cast as alluring ‘orientals’ were highly fashionable at the turn of the twentieth-century.</p><p><em>Gallery label, September 2004</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
11 October 2002 – 5 January 2003
2003-01-05
11 October 2002 – 5 January 2003
2003-01-05
2002-10-11
Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, USA)
2002-10-11
Whistler Sargent and Steer - Frist
Tate partnerships & programmes
12 March 2004 – 30 September 2004
2004-09-30
12 March 2004 – 14 June 2004
2004-06-14
2004-03-12
National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, Australia)
9 July 2004 – 12 September 2004
2004-09-12
2004-07-09
Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia)
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au
2004-03-12
The Edwardians
Loan-out
3 October 2006 – 13 May 2007
2007-05-13
3 October 2006 – 8 January 2007
2007-01-08
2006-10-03
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, Spain)
3 October 2006 – 8 January 2007
2007-01-08
2006-10-03
Fundación Caja (Casa de las Alhajas) (Madrid, Spain)
12 February 2007 – 13 May 2007
2007-05-13
2007-02-12
Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (Paris, France)
2006-10-03
Sargent/Sorolla
Loan-out
7 February 2008 – 30 April 2009
2009-04-30
26 September 2008 – 4 January 2009
2009-01-04
2008-09-26
Pera Museum (Istanbul, Turkey)
2008-02-07
British Orientalist Painting
Exhibition
18 February 2009 – 17 May 2009
2009-05-17
18 February 2009 – 17 May 2009
2009-05-17
2009-02-18
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2009-02-18
Van Dyck and Britain
Exhibition
15 October 2010 – 28 August 2011
2011-08-28
15 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
2011-01-09
2010-10-15
Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels, Belgium)
http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/
28 January 2011 – 1 May 2011
2011-05-01
2011-01-28
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung (Munich, Germany)
27 May 2011 – 28 August 2011
2011-08-28
2011-05-27
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Marseille, France)
2010-10-15
European Orientalists: From Delacroix to Kandinsky
Loan-out
15 November 2021 – 24 July 2022
2022-07-24
15 November 2021 – 24 July 2022
2022-07-24
2021-11-15
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2021-11-15
Sargent's Wertheimer Portraits
Collection based display
8 October 2023 – 7 July 2024
2024-07-07
8 October 2023 – 15 January 2024
2024-01-15
2023-10-08
Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA)
http://www.mfa.org
21 February 2024 – 7 July 2024
2024-07-07
2024-02-21
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2023-10-08
Sargent and Fashion
Exhibition
8 October 2023 – 15 January 2024
2024-01-15
8 October 2023 – 15 January 2024
2024-01-15
2023-10-08
Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA)
http://www.mfa.org
2023-10-08
Sargent and Fashion
Loan-out
Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer
support: 1340 × 1010 mm
frame: 1613 × 1268 × 157 mm
Presented by the widow and family of Asher Wertheimer in accordance with his wishes 1922
<div><p><i>Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer </i><span>is a large portrait painting made in 1908 by John Singer Sargent. Almina Wertheimer sits on a bed or divan with one leg bent underneath her, wearing a white dress and a silk Ottoman entari, or robe, with green cashmere patterns. She also wears a jewelled choker and a turban made of an assemblage of pale green silk, pearls and feathers. In her hands she holds a sarod, a stringed instrument from northern India. In the foreground, slices of melon rest on a scallop-shaped silver dish. Behind the sitter, light filters through a window on the left. The dark expanse in the upper part of the painting is suggestive of the textile hangings that Sargent often deployed, although this area is not rendered in detail.</span></p><p><span>This is the last in a series of twelve formal portraits of members of the Wertheimer family that Sargent painted between 1898 and 1908. By 1908 Sargent had largely abandoned painting commissioned portraits. His decision to paint this portrait, therefore, is indicative of the personal and professional bond that he had established with the family by this time. The title refers to Asher Wertheimer, the art dealer who commissioned the paintings. Almina Wertheimer (1886–c.1928) was the fifth daughter of Asher and Flora Wertheimer, and Sargent had previously painted her as part of the group portrait </span><i>Hylda, Almina, and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer </i><span>1905 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-hylda-almina-and-conway-children-of-asher-wertheimer-n03712" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N03712</span></a>), in which Almina wears a dark riding habit and red beret and carries a riding crop.</span></p><p><span>The portrait stands out both within the Wertheimer series and as a formal portrait within Sargent’s oeuvre for its reference to Orientalist painting. This is a genre in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists (many of whom had never travelled beyond Europe) depicted scenes of life to the east of the Mediterranean, especially in countries such as India, China and Japan, from an often uninformed or objectifying perspective. In his 1979 book </span><i>Orientalism</i><span>, literary critic Edward Said describes Orientalism as a cultural discourse that represents ‘The Orient’ as an inferior, historically static and geographically vague place formed in the ‘Western imagination’ in service of imperial dominance. Sargent’s painting contains several tropes of Orientalist painting – including the costume, sarod, setting and fruit bowl – which are not found anywhere else in Sargent’s portraiture and which, taken together, may be read as a pastiche of the Orientalist genre. For instance, the art historian and curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons has compared Almina’s pose and holding of the musical instrument with those of the figure of the musician in </span><i>Odalisque, Slave, Eunuch </i><span>1839–40 (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts) by Jean August Dominique Ingres, whom Corbeau-Parsons describes as the ‘epitome of the Orientalist painter’ (Corbeau-Parsons 2023, p.128).</span></p><p><span>Sargent accumulated a large collection of textiles during his travels in West Asia and North Africa (largely undertaken as research for his mural cycles at the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and he regularly depicted these fabrics in his paintings. The entari was part of this collection, and the sarod was also owned by Sargent (sold at Anderson Gallery, New York, 3 May 1929, lot 345). In August 1907, one of Sargent’s models, Jane de Glehn, wrote:</span></p><blockquote><span>Yesterday I spent all day posing in the morning in Turkish costume for Sargent on the mossy banks of the brook. I and Rose-Marie, one of the little Ormonds. He is doing a harem disporting itself on the banks of the stream. He has stacks of lovely Oriental clothes and dresses anyone he can get in them.</span><br/><span>(Jane de Glehn to her mother, 13 August 1907, Emmet Family Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., box 4, folder 54.)</span></blockquote><p><span>The use of the word ‘Oriental’ by de Glehn betrays her lack of knowledge about the origins of the clothes in Sargent’s collection, which are described simply as originating in an unspecified ‘Orient’. There is indeed a photograph of Rose-Marie Ormond, one of Sargent’s regular models, wearing the same entari worn by Almina, in which Sargent painted her in </span><i>The Brook </i><span>c.1907 (private collection; repr. in Hirshler 2023, p.96).</span></p><p><span>Almina’s clothing in the Tate portrait raises questions of cultural appropriation, since the way Almina is dressed betrays a misunderstanding or disregard of her clothing’s origins. An entari of this style would usually have been closed with a belt or shawl, and worn with şalvar (loose trousers) and a gömlek (chemise) rather than over a dress as shown here. The painting may also make reference to the racial stereotyping of Jewish women in nineteenth-century Britain. Art historian Kathleen Adler has suggested that an element of critique or parody informed the choice of dress for the portrait:</span></p><blockquote><span>She is shown as an exotic object of desire; the still life of slices of melon in the foreground underscores both the exoticism and the ‘ripeness’ and sexuality of the sitter. This portrait embraces the stereotype of ‘the beautiful Jewess’ and acknowledges how that stereotype … lumps together Jewish women with Turkish, Greek, and Spanish women – but never, of course, with ‘English’ women.</span><br/><span>(Adler 1995, p.94.)</span></blockquote><p><span>More recently, Corbeau-Parsons has suggested a link with Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of </span><i>Mrs. Charles Yorke </i><span>c.1763, which the composition echoes (Corbeau-Parsons 2023, p.131). In both pictures the sitter holds a stringed musical instrument and wears an open robe over a dress. In the case of Mrs Yorke, however, these are European objects. This portrait belonged to Charles Wertheimer, Almina’s uncle and Asher’s older brother, but was stolen in a high-profile robbery in February 1907. The painting was never recovered, in spite of Charles Wertheimer’s offer of a substantial reward for its return (David Mannings, </span><i>Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings</i><span>, London and New Haven 2000, p.488). The similarities between the two pictures, together with the proximity between the disappearance of one and the painting of the other, makes it likely that Sargent was alluding to Reynolds’s painting in his own.</span></p><p><span>Made soon after Sargent resolved to abandon commissioned portraiture, </span><i>Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer </i><span>marks the transition between Sargent’s formal portraiture and the more intimate paintings of figures (drawn from friends and family) in landscapes that became an increasingly significant part of his work in the early years of the twentieth century (see, for instance, </span><i>The Black Brook</i><span> c.1908, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-the-black-brook-n04783" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N04783</span></a>). While throughout his career Sargent paid attention to how his sitters were dressed and styled, it is in the later outdoor works that the collection of textiles he acquired on his travels was most often used to dress his sitters.</span></p><p><span>Unlike most of the Wertheimer portraits, this work was not exhibited at London’s Royal Academy soon after completion. It hung in the morning-room of the Wertheimer house in Connaught Place in London (familiarly described as ‘Sargent’s Mess’ because of the number of paintings by Sargent which hung in the room). It was first exhibited at the International Society in London in 1910, shortly after which the critic and dealer Robert Ross wrote of the work’s presence in Connaught Place that ‘despite the other rare works of art crowding the walls she reigns alone, a youthful sovereign among subjects’ (Robert Ross, ‘The Wertheimer Sargents’, </span><i>Art Journal</i><span>, no.73, 1911, p.8). Following the death of Asher Wertheimer, the work, together with most of the series, was presented to the National Gallery (1922) and transferred to Tate (1926).</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b></p><p><span>Kathleen Adler, ‘John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Wertheimer Family’, in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (eds.), </span><i>The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity</i><span>,</span><i> </i><span>London and New York 1995, pp.83–96.</span><br/><span>Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, </span><i>John Singer Sargent: The Later Portraits (Complete Paintings Volume III)</i><span>, London 2003, pp.202–4.</span><br/><span>Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, ‘Almina Wertheimer’, in Erica Hirshler (ed.), </span><i>Sargent and Fashion</i><span>,</span><i> </i><span>exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2023, pp.128–31.</span></p><p><span>James Finch</span><br/><span>December 2023</span></p></div>
Summary
2024-05-07T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="para6">
<span class="text0">This <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>painting</span></a> was the last in the series  of      Sargent’s <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/portrait" title="Glossary definition for 'Portrait'"><span>portraits</span></a> of the Wertheimer family. Almina was Asher      Wertheimer’s fifth daughter. She is shown in an exotic,      ‘oriental’ costume, including an ivory-white Persian dress and      a turban entwined with pearls. The white and green over-jacket was a studio      prop and the musical instrument (the sarod from northern India) was owned      by the artist.  
Such fantasy images of European women cast as alluring      ‘orientals’ were highly fashionable at the turn of the  
twentieth-century. </span>
</div>

Display caption
2004-09-09T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
<p><b>N03713</b> ALMINA, DAUGHTER OF ASHER WERTHEIMER 1908</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Inscr. ‘John S. Sargent’ t.l. and ‘1908’ t.r.
<br/>Canvas, 52 3/4×39 3/4 (134×98·5), with painted strips 5 (13), 3 1/2 (9), 4 1/4 (11), and 5 1/2 (14) wide turned over along top, left, right and bottom edges respectively.
<br/>Presented to the National Gallery by the widow and family of Asher Wertheimer in accordance with his wishes 1922; transferred 1926.
<br/><i>Coll:</i> As for <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-asher-wertheimer-n03705" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N03705</span></a>.
<br/><i>Exh:</i> <i>Fair Women</i>, International Society, May–July 1910 (31), as ‘Almina’, lent by Asher Wertheimer.
<br/><i>Lit:</i> Robert Ross, ‘The Wertheimer Sargents’ in <i>Art Journal</i>, 1911, p.8, repr. p.6; Downes, 1925, p.199; Charteris, 1927, p.270 (listed as of 1902); Mount, 1955, pp.225, 437 (as 1902); McKibbin, 1956, p.130; Mount, 1957, pp.187, 349.</p>
<p>The sitter, who also appears in <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-hylda-almina-and-conway-children-of-asher-wertheimer-n03712" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N03712</span></a>, wears Persian costume and holds a Persian sixteenth-century eight-stringed lute.</p>
<p><b>Published in:</b>
<br/>Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, <i>The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture</i>, London 1964, II
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-07-20T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
actions: postures and motions adults dress: fantasy/fancy dress: nations/regions exotic Fachiri, Almina fine arts and music individuals: female instrument, sarod leisure and pastimes Middle East music music and entertainment named individuals objects people portraits sitting society Wertheimer, Almina woman