Seventy years after he left Shanghai, legendary tycoon Sir Victor Sassoon has returned home.
Thanks to a donation by his closest living family members, his portraits and those of his wife Lady Sassoon have arrived at the Fairmont Peace Hotel, the signature property on the Bund that he built and prided himself on the most.
With the portraits hanging in his former residence, the hotel’s presidential suite, the man who played a crucial role in building 1930s Shanghai has returned to his beloved home and reunited with the views of the Bund and the Huangpu River outside the windows, which he called “his muse”.
“It’s a very emotional experience for us to come back to the place where he once lived and entertained. It’s nice to sense his presence back in all its former glory,” says Sassoon’s nephew Roy E. Barnes. He was speaking at the unveiling of the pictures on May 31.
Barnes and his two older sisters became Sassoon’s nephew and nieces after Sassoon married their aunt, an American nurse, in the 1950s.
The oil painting portraits, completed in London in 1960, were originally displayed in the family’s home in Nassau of the Bahamas, where Sassoon spent the last years of his life.
