Art, grace and glamour

With their elegance and exquisite taste, the Sassoons enlivened early 20th-century English society – but remained outsiders. Rhoda Koenig examines a new biography and exhibition

In a room clad in gilded panelling, a young man leans gracefully against a mantel holding a golden clock, next to a young woman seated near a window in a pool of golden light. They are the Sassoons, Sybil (1894-1989) and her brother, Philip (1888-1939), and their lives were as golden as the painting, by William Orpen, which serves as the cover of a new biography. The painting itself, along with Sargents, Zoffanys and other works the Sassoons commissioned, modelled for and collected, are on show in London in aid of the Norfolk Churches Trust. Many of the pictures, including the famous Danckerts painting of Charles II being presented with a pineapple by his gardener, are from Houghton Hall, the Palladian mansion built by Robert Walpole and the seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley. The sister of one of the two most desirable bachelors of her time, Sybil, married the other one in 1913. She and her brother lived in a rich atmosphere of culture. A visitor might find Philip being painted by Sargent while reading his most recent letter from Proust; Paul Manship sculpting a bust of Sybil; and the piano being played by Artur Rubinstein.

The best-known Sassoons today are Philip and Sybil's second cousin Siegfried and the hairdresser Vidal (no relation). But in the early 20th century, the brother and sister were a byword for charm, taste and luxury. The first quality, in Sybil's case, survives in the many portraits of her by John Singer Sargent, who also portrayed her mother and her brother, and by Orpen. Wyndham Lewis, whose Vorticist women look like larvae, could not disguise, in his portrait, her grace and femininity. Her favourite was the half-length, Gainsborough-like one that Sargent gave her as a wedding present. Clutching golden draperies to her breast, she looks delicate, even vulnerable, but not, as in the others, melancholy. (Orphaned at 18, Sybil said, "Sorrow is a great forcing house.") Whether she is in an infanta's gown and long ropes of pearls, or a fragile grey Fortuny creation with a flower that matches her lips, or informally dressed, glancing over her shoulder, Sybil's heavy, dark brows and large, deep-set, dark eyes proclaim her gentle gravity as clearly as the fact that she was Jewish.

Some said at the time of his marriage that the Fifth Marquess had ruined himself socially, but if such remarks could still be made, even if in envy, against them was Sybil's degree of assimilation and, of course, her wealth. The Sassoons originated in Baghdad, coming to England by way of Persia, then Bombay. Cotton mills, merchant banking and opium (then a legal trade) made them influential as well as rich, and some of them decided to expand their empire to the heart of the larger one that then ruled India. Their success was as swift as it was great. In 1858, a Sassoon, the first of the family to wear Western dress, arrived in London. Twenty-two years later, his brother Abdullah, Philip and Sybil's grandfather, was a baronet, Sir Albert Sassoon of Kensington Gore. Both Abdullah and his son, Edward, were good friends of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Philip became a great chum of the next Prince, and at Sybil's 90th birthday party 11 of the 90 guests were royals, among them the Queen. (There would have been 13, but Diana, Princess of Wales, said that she had another engagement, and Prince Charles didn't want to put the table out.)

The golden couple undoubtedly glided so easily through the corridors of wealth and power because they were Jewish only by inheritance, not by practice. Philip's origins were apparent in his profile, his non-sectarian generosity and his exotic aesthetic. At a time when the terms "ostentatious", "urban" and "cosmopolitan" were anathema to the English aristocracy, just as much as "Jewish" (for which, of course, they were euphemisms), Philip's tastes ran to black glass, porphyry and numerous bathrooms. Finding the drainpipes distasteful, he had them gilded, and not only were his books bound in white buckram, but the telephone directory, too. When he tired of his Park Lane mansion, he could retreat to Trent Park, his 1,000-acre estate at the northern end of the Piccadilly Line, with its black swans, flamingos and penguins, or Port Lympne in Kent. The last, which he had built at his constituency, Hythe (he was its MP for 27 years), was used for a few international conferences and many parties, with such guests as George Bernard and Aircraftsman Shaw (TE Lawrence), Charlie Chaplin and Noël Coward.

Some of those guests sniggered at him when he had turned from pouring their champagne, calling his manners, furnishings and opinions vulgarly Jewish. Chips Channon disapprovingly recorded in his diary Philip's attacking the Nazis "with the violence born of personal prejudice". Such passion was rare in Philip, who was valued for his diplomacy. In the First World War he was private secretary to Field Marshal Haig; later, parliamentary private secretary to Lloyd George, Haig's worst enemy. After that, he undertook disarmament talks with Goering, who never suspected that the envoy's relatives included a rabbi. But if Philip didn't proclaim that he was Jewish, he never denied it. Perhaps the one time he was furious with his beloved sister (he always said he had not married because he couldn't find her equal) was when he discovered she had let her children think she was a Gentile. The most striking of Philip's portraits is one by Glyn Philpot, in which his pale, sharp features stand out boldly against the black hair and coat that merge into the background. If Sybil looks as if she has been pained by bad news but resigned herself to it, Philip looks as if he has heard even worse and is about to say, "Oh, really? Is that all?"

While Philip was the connoisseur and collector, Sybil was the conservator. She renovated and refurbished Houghton Hall, which had been neglected by the Cholmondeleys for a century, and rebuilt the magnificent exterior stone staircase, though she had to sell all her Renaissance jewels to do it. Her greatest coup took the form of every Antiques Roadshow viewer's dream, though the reality was wilder than anyone would dare imagine. On a visit to Cholmondeley Castle, the home of her husband's parents, she spotted a picture in an obscure back room that looked as if it were worth a bit more than the £5 for which it was insured. While her father-in-law was alive, she said nothing. "He was interested in horses rather than paintings," says her grandson Charles Cholmondeley, "and rather keen on selling things. So it wasn't until after he died that she had it authenticated." It turned out to be a Holbein, The Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, and was hung at Houghton for the rest of her life, then sold to the National Gallery for £10m. Philip, whom she outlived by 50 years, would have been pleased. He had been the chairman of its board, replacing the Earl of Crawford, who had not had perhaps the most helpful attitude for the head of a museum: "I try to keep away from the rich Jew or American," he once said. "I don't want to be mixed up with Asiatics."

Philip's monument is less tangible. The Park Lane mansion was razed after the war; Port Lympne, with its exquisite mural by Rex Whistler, is now part of an Aspinall zoo; Trent Park has been swallowed up by Middlesex University; the Velasquez and Gainsboroughs and other masterpieces he collected have been dispersed. But in the Twenties and Thirties, as undersecretary of state for air, Philip was one of the most forceful advocates for a strong Air Force. Arguing that unilateral disarmament, which many favoured, was suicide, he fought for, and won, a huge build-up in the might of the RAF. To help the new service compete with the Army and the Navy for top-level recruits, he gave parties at which airmen could meet royalty and be treated like it. It is pleasing to think of Chips Channon, the Earl of Crawford and, indeed, all England being indebted to Philip Sassoon, the man who was glamorous for his country.

'The Sassoons' by Peter Stansky, Yale University Press, £25. The Sassoon exhibition is at Agnew's gallery, 43 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020-7290 9255) to 23 May