Charles and jayne wrightsman biography

“Jayne recognized that his oil business could be managed without drudgery, that he was too old for sport, that gambling did not interest him, that yachting could never be a full-time occupation," John Walker, the former director of the National Gallery of Art and Wrightsman mentor, wrote in his memoirs about the couple’s decision to become serious collectors. "What should she do to help him avoid his major problem, boredom? Why not dedicate themselves to art, to learning about it, to seeing it, to collecting it?" As he recalled upon meeting her in 1951, on their rented yacht in Venice, after a chat about his work as chief curator of the National Gallery, “It did not matter that she was artistically unsophisticated. The spark was there, ready to burst into flame.” As for her husband, Walker frankly observed, “There was even less in Charles’s background to indicate a commitment to art.”

The Wrightsmans overcame their untutored state with seemingly instantaneous enthusi

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How Jayne Wrightsman transformed herself into a legendary socialite

When Jayne Wrightsman, art collector, samhälle maven, trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a stiletto in a velvet glove, died at her home at 820 Fifth Ave. on Saturday at age 99, it was the end of an era.

Wrightsman may have been nouveau riche, but her taste and style were a calculated homage to an aristocratic way of life that she reinvented and then outlived.

One of the museum’s greatest benefactors, she gave it works of art and objects of decor that harkened back, as did she, to a time when taste was inextricably linked to great wealth. Her gifts — paintings by Delacroix, Vermeer, El Greco, Rubens, de La Tour, and Tiepolo, and 18th- and 19th-century decorative objects, many crafted for the kings of France — went from her homes to the museum’s suite of Wrightsman Rooms and reflected her ability to man herself and her surroundings over in the image of amerikansk whiskey France.

Brooke Astor, Jane Engelhard, Pat

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Jayne Wrightsman and The Costume Institute

Harold Koda, Former Curator in Charge, The Costume Institute  

Clothing is an especially potent representation of aesthetic sensibility. Even an erratic sampling of an individual's wardrobe, over their lifetime, is as much biography as it is documentation of period style. The collection of The Costume Institute, therefore, focuses on works implicitly freighted with the history of the people who wore them. Moreover, its archives, here in an art museum, must address artistic achievement in relation to the works in its sister departments.

Given her discerning eye for paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, it is not surprising that Mrs. Wrightsman included in her contributions to the Metropolitan garments that are significant in their artistic merit. A number of the most exquisite works of haute couture from the second half of the twentieth century are from Mrs. Wrightsman's wardrobe. Presented to the Museum over five decad