On 18 May 1922, Sydney Schiff and his wife Violet hosted a late-night dinner at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris to celebrate the premiere of Stravinsky's Renard. Among the guests at the party honouring the artists who had created the work – the composer, the dancers of the Ballets Russes and their impresario Diaghilev – were Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. That ‘great modernist dinner party’ (Davenport-Hines 2006) is without doubt the epitome of Sydney Schiff's activity as an international go-between and promoter of culture.

Schiff, the illegitimate son of a beautiful high society lady and a rich Jewish German banker, embodied cosmopolitanism. He was a British writer and patron of the arts with a complex identity: he published under the pen-name Stephen Hudson and created a double self-portrait in his autobiographical works where he was both the fictitious character Richard Kurt and the first-person narrative voice. His second wife, Violet Beddington (1874–1962), was his accomplice in matters social and literary; together they developed a wide, international friendship circle, as T. S. Eliot reports:

Eliot defined the ‘great point in the Schiffs’ favour’ as ‘[their capacity when entertaining] of bringing very diverse people together and making them combine well’ (Eliot 1988: 411). In her presentation of the letters exchanged between Sydney Schiff and Aldous Huxley, Clémentine Robert stressed that Violet and her husband were at the heart of an intellectual and artistic ‘plexus’ (Huxley 1976: 16). They kept an open house favouring cross-Channel exchange which Robert described as the prefiguration of a cultural Common Market: