Elle Decor - USA (2019-09)

118 ELLE DECOR

HOUGHTON

HALL

The shawl

reappears in

Sargent’s Two

Girls in White

Dresses, 19 09–11,

from a private

collection.

Houghton Hall’s current owners,

Lord David George Philip Cholmon-

deley and his wife, Rose Hanbury.

A Sargent portrait of

his niece and muse,

Rose-Marie Ormond.

BACKGROUND: A Kash-

mir Loom reproduction

of the Sargent shawl.

In Pursuit of Paisley

A GLOBE-SPANNING JOURNEY IN

SEARCH OF AN ICONIC SCARF.

[the shawl],” Adelson says. “So it was something that Jenny

and I had in common. We knew how special it was to the

artist, but also that it was such a special object.”

Alas, the shawl was not for sale. Nonetheless, Adelson

arranged for Housego to see it in Cholmondeley’s London

flat. The room was dark and her flash failed, but she got her

first sense of the actual piece. “When I finally was able to

lay my hand on the shawl, I was surprised to find that it was

made of rather coarse wool, not cashmere,” she recalls. “I

got the best pictures I could under the circumstances, but it

is one of Lady Sybil in a Worth Spanish gown, where the

dress sets the tone for the painting, and a bust-length por-

trait of Sybil wrapped in the shawl.”

That may be how the original Sargent cashmere shawl,

given by Sargent to Sybil, was found at Houghton Hall. “We

do not know the circumstances,” Lord Cholmondeley says.

Jenny Housego eventually found an acquaintance who had

seen the original: Warren Adelson, whose galleries in New

York and Palm Beach specialize in 19th- and 20th-century

American art. Adelson had known Cholmondeley and vis-

ited Houghton Hall. “Over the years, my wife and I had seen

But as Housego discovered, Sargent’s painting technique

was far from literal. “He does not seem to change things,

but he leaves out detail,” Hirshler says. “It is his view of the

object. Sargent gives you the impression of a pattern with-

out using a tiny brush to capture every dot, and he arranges

them differently. He is not giving you a design that you can

use to make your own shawl.” So when Housego set out

to re-create the piece, one of her first goals was to see the

original, or one of them. (It has been speculated that the

artist had more than one.)

In the same years that Sargent was wrapping Rose-Marie

Ormond in cashmere, he was close with two major English

patrons and collectors, Philip Sassoon and his sister, Sybil.

The siblings were born to Sir Edward Albert Sassoon and

Aline Caroline de Rothschild, of the French branch of

the famous family. Interestingly, on their father’s side,

there are some important connections to India: Their

great-grandfather, David Sassoon, founded a large banking

and mercantile business in Bombay, now Mumbai, in the

mid-19th century. Philip and Sybil were passionate about the

arts. “Both were very involved in artistic circles in England

and in Paris in the early 20th century and overlapped a lot

with Sargent’s world,” Hirshler says. “They were interested

in music, not just the visual arts.”

S

ybil, a Jew, married George Cholmondeley, the

5th Marquess of Cholmondeley, a descendant

of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minis-

ter of Great Britain, in 1913, making her Sybil

Cholmondeley, the Marchioness of Cholmon-

deley. She moved into the family’s Hough-

ton Hall, the Downton Abbey–like 106-room

Palladian-style estate on 4,000 acres that was

built by Walpole in the 1720s. The architecture, by Colen

Campbell and James Gibbs, is commanding: a four-story

rectangular block of stone, with turrets at each of the cor-

ners. The interiors, by William Kent, are sumptuous. And

when Sybil arrived, the collection of art, though it had dwin-

dled over the generations, was remarkable.

Her husband was an avid sportsman and one of the most

handsome men of his day. He was also, like many an English

aristocrat, short on cash. Sybil, flush with Rothschild riches,

restored Houghton to its former glory, though the current

marquess also credits her brother, Philip. “Philip commis-

sioned a portrait of himself and one of Sybil and bought a

number of other paintings,” says Lord David Cholmondeley,

Sybil’s grandson. “Sargent had painted their mother, Aline

Sassoon, in 1907, and a first portrait of Sybil as a wedding

present in 1913. Philip’s collection of paintings passed to

Sybil after the death of her cousin, Hannah Gubbay, who

had inherited the Sargents from Philip for her lifetime.”

In 1999, the current marquess sold off $23 million of art

and heirlooms from Houghton Hall, including an oil sketch

by Rubens and a pair of ormolu swans originally made for

Madame de Pompadour, to pay for maintenance. But the

estate’s holdings, which include several family portraits

by Sargent, remain considerable. “They are so fabulous—I

was stunned by them,” Hirshler says of the Sargents in the

collection. “There are several great portraits, including

one of Aline Rothschild Sassoon in an opera cloak. There