Vital SASSOON

Weary of the Windsors? Meet this season’s new It dynasty.

- JAMES REGINATO

In recent months the saga of the Sassoon family has been a hot topic. It was chronicled onscreen in Benediction, a biopic directed by Terence Davies that focuses on the tormented, glamorous life of First World Warera poet Siegfried Sassoon, and in print in The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire, by historian (and descendant) Joseph Sassoon, which charts the rise and fall of the family's empire, across three continents and two centuries.

Now a major museum exhibition, "The Sassoons, is opening March 3 at the Jewish Museum in New York. It presents perhaps the most vivid picture yet of the family, through more than 120 superlative works of art they commissioned or collected.