‘A not so subtle misogyny’: Sargent portraits of ‘dollar princesses’ come to London
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Portraits of wealthy American heiresses who married into British society will be shown at Kenwood in London. 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”.
![[Esther Addley]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/06/05/Esther_Addley.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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.
![[Mary Crowninshield Endicott is painted wearing an elegant dress with lots of fabric around her upper arms]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/da0d2c321bed1f8b4ae837ea2a5aff1d9df5dfc9/0_286_2295_3404/master/2295.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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.
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