A New Exhibition at Kenwood!
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits – 16 May – 5 October 2025
We are delighted to announce that for the first time in 25 years, there will be a major loan exhibition at Kenwood.
2025 is the centenary year of John Singer Sargent’s death, and to celebrate this landmark year, approximately 18 of Sargent’s works will be exhibited in the Music Room and the Green Room. These include Kenwood’s own Daisy Leiter, loans of full-length oil paintings from America and the UK, and charcoal drawings from around the world.
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits will offer a new reading of the women in the portraits, heiresses who married into the European aristocracy. That they were beautiful and alluring goes without saying but they also possess a candour and self-confidence peculiarly American to which Sargent is alert. The financial successes of their families represented the future, while the British aristocracy remained locked in the past, economically and politically in decline. The exhibition will present these individuals as women of more substance than simply provincial, rich Americans, willing to exchange money for title. It will explore the contribution they made to society and tell some of their noteworthy stories, giving them more agency in the retelling than they have been credited with to date. It was inevitable that Sargent, as the leading Anglo-American portrait painter of his time, would be commissioned to paint or draw a fair number of these “dollar princesses.”
The Friends of Kenwood and English Heritage are extraordinarily lucky to have the expertise of Friends of Kenwood Council member, Richard Ormond CBE, great-nephew of John Singer Sargent, and author of the 9-volume Sargent catalogue raisonné, he is well-known to many of our members. Dr Wendy Monkhouse is Curator of the exhibition, and is also well-known to many of you, as English Heritage’s Senior Curator (South), with responsibility for a large number of significant painting collections at English Heritage.
This exhibition perfectly links Kenwood’s two great philanthropic collections, the Iveagh Bequest and the Suffolk Collection. Sargent’s artistic training was extensive, and his full-length portraits have more than a touch of Gainsborough about them. Margaret, Countess of Suffolk bequeathed her collection to the nation, and Sargent’s portrait of her as Daisy Leiter, heiress to the Marshall Field department store, 6 years before her marriage into the Howard family, hangs on the staircase at Kenwood.
Image: Margaret ‘Daisy’ Howard, 19th Countess of Suffolk, by John Singer Sargent, 1898
December 2024
