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John Singer Sargent’s ‘Dollar Princesses’
- Staff
- Jul 10
- 6 min read
A fresh look at portraits from the Gilded Age
By Margie MacKinnon
Originally published in
RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Wilton Phipps (Jessie Wilton Phipps) c. 1884 © Steven DeWitt Lowy
In the years between 1880 and 1920, some 400 marriages took place between American women and European aristocrats. It was understood that the women, daughters of nouveau riche industrialists from Britain’s erstwhile colony, were seeking social status and titles in exchange for a much-needed influx of cash into the depleted coffers of titled European families. The women were sneeringly referred to as ‘Dollar Princesses’, lumped together as having no individuality or interest beyond the size of their dowries.
Whatever other attributes they may have possessed, one thing many of the so-called ‘Dollar Princesses’ did have in common was to have their likenesses painted by the foremost portrait painter of the day: John Singer Sargent, an American-born, French-trained artist who lived and worked mainly in London. A new exhibition at Kenwood House in London will bring together 18 of Sargent’s portraits of these young American ex-pats.
The timing of the exhibition is auspicious because 2025 marks the centenary of Sargent’s death in 1925. Kenwood House and its estate, which adjoins Hampstead Heath, was the home of Lord Mansfield and is now a picture gallery overseen by English Heritage. Their collection includes Sargent’s portrait of Daisy Leiter, originally of Chicago, who would become the nineteenth Countess of Suffolk on her marriage to Henry Howard. As part of a gift to the nation from the Countess, Kenwood acquired the Sargent portrait which now hangs conspicuously in the main stairway of the house.
Curator Wendy Monkhouse explains that, “the reason we’re doing the show is that it’s never been done before. Of all the Sargent shows that have happened, nobody’s actually done the ‘Dollar Princesses’. So it seemed exciting because, with Daisy Leiter’s portrait, we have an extraordinary key work. Then, when I started looking into the heiresses who sat for Sargent, I started to wonder if the generalisations about them held up. The research began and, looking at them one by one, it became clear that only a few fit the stereotype behind the ‘cash for coronets’ tag.”
Commissioned as a birthday gift from her parents, Daisy’s portrait was exhibited in the 1898 summer show at the Royal Academy. Daisy, a nineteen-year-old with “the loveliest eyes in Washington,” looks directly out at the viewer in a fabulous Worth gown. “It was not a marriage portrait,” says Monkhouse, “as in, it was not a portrait to get a husband, nor was it a portrait upon a marriage. Sargent didn’t keep sitter books, so it is difficult to know exactly when and where it was painted.” Daisy brought youth and beauty to her marriage to the Duke of Suffolk, as well as funds to restore Charlton Park, the family seat in Wiltshire, which had fallen into disrepair ever since the family had backed the wrong side in England’s Civil War. However, the marriage was relatively short-lived, as Henry died in battle during the first World War. Daisy raised their three children on her own, never remarrying. A keen horsewoman, it has been suggested that, later in life, she became a helicopter pilot and flew from her Cornish home to her suite at the Ritz Hotel via the Battersea Heliport. “At the moment, I’m trying to find her helicopter license,” says Monkhouse, “because the Ritz story is told all the time and I want to know, did she fly it herself or not? Because if she actually knew how to fly a helicopter, that’s quite impressive.”
Daisy’s most lasting accomplishment was her bequest to the nation of the collection of artworks from Charlton Park. The Suffolk Collection, as it is known, occupies the upper floor at Kenwood House and features royal and family portraits spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including an important group of paintings by Jacobean portraitist William Larkin.
The Music Room at Kenwood in Hampstead, London, courtesy of Kenwood House
Though some of the marriages were undoubtedly transactional, others were grounded in affection. Lyon Playfair, first Baron Playfair, recalled in his memoirs that his wife, the former Edith Russell of Boston, “has been to me a constant source of support and sympathy, both in my private and public life.” He was also delighted that, through her family, he became acquainted with the highly intellectual mavens of Boston society. “Longfellow, Emerson, Wendell Holmes, Lowell, and other men of light and leading I met at their house, forming many pleasant friendships for the future.” Monkhouse notes that, “Edith Playfair’s portrait from 1884 is the earliest in the show, and it’s absolutely fantastic. She is wearing a fashionable gold cuirasse bodice which is meant to look like the sort of waistcoating piece of defensive armour worn over the chest.”
Another trans-Atlantic union that excited a lot of press interest was the 1888 marriage of Mary Crowninshield Endicott of Salem, Massachusetts to Joseph Chamberlain. Mary was a descendent of John Endecott, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Ellen Peabody Endicott, granddaughter of one of the wealthiest men in America, Captain Joseph Peabody. Her impressive pedigree was much remarked upon, with Mary’s brother suggesting that it was, perhaps, the bridegroom who was a bit too middle class. But with a substantial income and estates of his own (although no peerage), Chamberlain was not looking for a bride to bail him out. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one, with Mary assuming social duties and supporting her husband’s political concerns after he became Colonial Secretary in 1895, engaging in the quiet diplomacy that comes from “orchestrating conversations over dinner and mediating between people who wouldn’t ordinarily get on,” says Monkhouse.
In her memoirs, Joyce Grenfell, a noted actor and writer who had her own photographic portrait done by Lord Snowden, dated the painting of her grandmother, Jesse Wilton Phipps. “The Sargent portrait of my grandmother hangs in our living room,” she wrote. “It was painted in 1883, three years after the birth of her eldest son, my father. She was enchanting to look at even as an old lady, and she was obviously remarkably good-looking as a young woman when John Singer Sargent painted her portrait. I love the picture, but I never got close enough to my grandmother to love her …But there were compensations about staying at Chorleywood (her country house)… There was a sponge cake of the most satisfactory consistency. After a slice had been wrested from it, the cake rose back to its original height, at least five inches of it.” But before Mrs. Wilton Phipps became a cake-baking grandma (or a grandma with a good cook), she had a career as a municipal politician. Phipps was elected to London County Council in 1907, and served on the council’s education committee, chairing it from 1923 to 1926, the first woman to do so. In 1926, Phipps was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
It is interesting to imagine Sargent at work in his Tite Street studio in Chelsea darting back and forth to his easel while painting portraits in the time-honoured ‘sight-size’ tradition, which requires the artist to stand at a distance to view the canvas and the subject side-by-side, then rushing back to apply brushstrokes freely to the canvas. What would the American heiresses have made of the rather large painter, who was otherwise unfailingly polite and charming, retreating and advancing while staring at them with fierce intensity?
One of the visitors to the exhibition will be Charles Cecil whose eponymous studio in Florence aims to preserve and advance the ‘sight-size’ tradition of drawing and painting from life, whose exponents have included Velazquez, Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as Sargent. In 2022, works by students from the Cecil atelier were featured in the exhibition ‘Portrait Dialogues’ at Villa Il Palmerino in Florence, former home of the writer Violet Paget, better known as Vernon Lee. Sargent was a childhood friend of Lee’s and frequently attended her weekly salons there. His loosely painted portrait of her, dedicated to “my friend Violet” reveals something of her intellectual nature and preference for ‘masculine’ attire. No one will mistake her for a ‘Dollar Princess’. In her essay, ‘The Psychology of an Art Writer,’ Lee, whose views on art were influenced by her relationship with Sargent, wrote that, “a great picture is made to be seen at several goes.” It is time to take another look at the heiress portraits - beyond the technique, beyond the fashion – to discover the women regarding us confidently from the canvas.
MARGIE MACKINNON
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