On display at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan through August 13, The Sassoons draws from the collection of the titular family, whose 19th-century commercial ventures won them great wealth, first in India and later in London. Ari Hoffman writes:
To walk into The Sassoons at the Jewish Museum is to time travel to an age when Jews from Baghdad traded opium at Beijing and bolts of cotton from Mumbai. . . . Outside of the Sassoon vault you are unlikely to see paintings by John Singer Sargent and Winston Churchill cohabitate with Karaite prayer books and Samaritan calendars, which in turn share space with Yuan-dynasty scrolls. This is eclecticism, and, it must be acknowledged, empire, at its most exquisite.
The story of the Sassoons begins in earnest with David, who served as Baghdad’s treasurer before leading the family to India when the tolerance of the pashas for Jews wore thin. He is captured in a luminous portrait attributed to William Melville, who worked in the 1840s. He wears a beige turban and robe, striped with reds and blues. This is an eminence, a 19th-century Moses who has led his family to safe harbor at Mumbai, here a peek of azure background.
Sargent, whose portraits structure the show like a spine, does painterly justice to Aline de Rothschild, Lady Sassoon. . . . Sargent also painted Sybil Sassoon, the countess of Rocksavage and Aline’s daughter. Charcoal sketches trace him finding his form before executing an oil portrait for her marriage. . . . The painting marks a contrast with, and a journey from, the k’tubot—marriage contracts—and Torah scrolls from old Baghdad. Those are just one room, and a world, away.
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/article/the-sassoons-summons-a-golden-age