Sassoon in interviews has stated that he grew up in a family that had an interest in art, and was therefore interested in it from a young age. He was schooled at Sunningdale School and Eton College, where he was taught ceramics by Gordon Baldwin; he went on to study further at Christie’s Education.[9][10]
He became fascinated with collecting items and began to do so while still a teenager.[11]
Career
Sassoon began his career working at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the age of 19 in 1980. He worked as a junior curator specialising in 18th Century French works of art. This specialty has remained with Sassoon throughout his career but has more recently also focused on contemporary art. After working at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Sassoon moved to work with a prominent art dealer in London, who was known for selling 17th & 18th Century decorative arts to American museums.[11] In 1991, he authored the catalogue of Vincennes and Sèvres porcelain in The J. Paul Getty Museum.[12]
By 1992, Sassoon had amassed a collection of Vincennes ceramics from the 18th century. Apart from a handful of pieces, he sold the collection in the early 1990s to the Sèvres City of Ceramics Museum when he first went it alone as a prominent dealer in this field.[13] Since selling his first Vincennes collection, he has over the subsequent decades formed another collection of new finds of the same early French porcelain.[14][13] Twenty pieces of this second collection are on long-term loan to The J. Paul Getty Museum.[15][13]
A number of pieces in Sassoon's art collection have been displayed in museums around the world.[16][13] He is also known to be a collector of sculptures by Hiroshi Suzuki, a leading contemporary silversmith and other contemporary works of art.[17][18] Sassoon curated a selection of contemporary ceramics and silver in ‘Inspired by Chatsworth’ for Sotheby’s New York exhibition in 2019 in association with The Chatsworth Estate.[19] During the same year, it was announced that three works by Dame Magdalene Odundo from Sassoon's collection were on display at The Hepworth Wakefield.[20]
Sassoon is a member of the Sassoon family, and was born in London, the son of Hugh Meyer Sassoon (first cousin of Siegfried Sassoon) and Marion (née Schiff); he is the great-great-grandson of Sassoon David Sassoon.
Articles and essays
Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain from a European Private Collection, International Ceramics Fair & Seminar, 2001[30]
Books
Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain: Catalogue of the Collections. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991.[12]
Decorative Arts: A Handbook of the Collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum.[31]
