Joan Whitney Payson

Vincent van Gogh: Irises from the Joan Whitney Payson Collection - 1987 the most expensive painting in the world

Joan Whitney Payson (born February 5, 1903 in New York , NY , USA ; † October 4, 1975 there ) was an American entrepreneur, art collector, patron . A co-heir to one of America's greatest assets, she donated funds to education, health care, and culture. She ran a successful horse breeding business with her brother and was a co-founder and majority shareholder of the New York Mets baseball team . Parts of her art collection are now in various American museums.

family

Joan Whitney's grandfather, William Collins Whitney , laid the foundations for the Whitney family's fortune . The Massachusetts-born attorney became one of the richest men in the United States through financial speculation and served as United States Secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland . Joan Whitney's father, William Payne Whitney , also worked in the financial sector, owned shares in banking, tobacco, oil and railroad companies, and served on the boards of several companies, including City Bank New York . In 1902 he married Helen Hay, the daughter of then Foreign Minister John Hay . William Payne Whitney established the family's patronage tradition through various foundations. For example, in 1923 he donated $ 12,000,000 to the New York Public Library and bequeathed $ 20,000,000 to the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in 1927. For their wedding, Joan Whitney's parents received from William Payne Whitney's uncle, Oliver Hazard Payne , a mansion on New York's Fifth Avenue , built by the architects McKim, Mead, and White , which now serves as the French cultural institute. In this house, as well as the 150-acre Greentree country estate in Manhasset , Joan Whitney grew up, as did her brother John Hay Whitney, who was born in 1904 . He later became the editor of the New York Herald Tribune and served as US ambassador to London from 1957 to 1961. Like his sister, he amassed an important art collection. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney , an aunt of Joan Whitney, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1931 . After graduating from Barnard College , Joan Whitney married lawyer and entrepreneur Charles Shipman Payson in 1924 . This marriage produced five children.

Sports

Shea Stadium - home of the New York Mets baseball team

Like many of the Whitney family, Joan Whitney Payson was very enthusiastic about sports. In addition to outdoor tennis courts, his father's property in Manhasset also had its own indoor tennis hall. For generations, however, the main focus has been on horse racing and horse breeding. Joan Whitney Payson's grandfather already owned a successful horse racing stable. Her father founded the Greentree Stable stud in Lexington , Kentucky, USA . After his death in 1930, Joan Whitney Payson and her brother inherited this stud and continued to run it until her death. Horses from this racing stable have repeatedly won important horse races such as the Kentucky Derby , the Preakness Stakes or the Belmont Stakes .

In 1950, Joan Whitney Payson bought her first share in the New York Giants baseball team and expanded her stake to ten percent in the following years. When in 1957 the majority shareholder Horace Stoneham decided to move the headquarters of the Giants to San Francisco, Joan Whitney Payson sold her stake in this team. After the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California at the same time and New York therefore had no team in the National League , Joan Whitney Payson decided to participate in the re-establishment of the New York Mets . As the majority shareholder and president of this team for many years, she determined the fate of the Mets for many years. Joan Whitney Payson was the first woman to own a professional team in any of the North American sports leagues.

Art collection

Joan Whitney Payson got to know works of art as a child in her parents' homes in New York City and Manhasset. In addition to numerous handicrafts, the collection mainly consisted of European paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, some of which were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after the mother's death . She built up Joan Whitney Payson's own collection since the 1940s. In addition to a few old masters' paintings, such as the depiction of Samson and Delilah by Lucas Cranach the Elder , she concentrated mainly on European - mostly French - painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as on their American contemporaries. The collection is no longer closed today. Parts of the collection ended up in various museum collections, other parts are still in private collections.

After the collector's death in 1975, a group of paintings was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the aforementioned Cranach picture, these included the Virgin and Child by Jan Provost from around 1500 and the paintings Die Mole von Cassis by Paul Signac , Die Road from Moret to Saint-Mammès by Alfred Sisley , Peonies and The Monet Family in the Garden of Argenteuil by Édouard Manet , the portrait of Toussaint Lemaistre by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot , a version of the bathers by Paul Cézanne and the woman in the garden of the Monsieur Forest by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . The museum also received watercolors from Thomas Eakins and Maurice Prendergast as part of this foundation . In addition to these paintings, the donor donated $ 5 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to build its American art showrooms, some of which have been known as the Joan Whitney Payson Galleries since 1980 .

In 1976, Joan Whitney Payson's husband donated 17 works by Maine artist Winslow Homer to the Portland Museum of Art . In addition, he made financial means available to enable an extension to the museum, which today bears the name Charles Shipman Payson Building . In 1991 the collector's son, John Whitney Payson , decided to donate around 20 works from his mother's possession to the museum in Portland. The Joan Whitney Payson Collection includes paintings Moret-sur-Loing by Alfred Sisley , Etretat in stormy weather by Gustave Courbet , White Cat in the studio of Albert Marquet , a landscape of 1933 by Chaim Soutine , Landscape at Saint-Cloud by Paul Gauguin , Two Monkeys in the Primeval Forest by Henri Rousseau , Spring in Argenteuil by Claude Monet and Doll in the Window by Albert Marquet. There are also pastels, watercolors and graphic works by Andrew Wyeth , Honoré Daumier , Pablo Picasso , John Singer Sargent , Marc Chagall , Edgar Degas , Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , Maurice Prendergast , James McNeill Whistler and William Glackens .

Since the 1980s, individual works of the paintings that remained in the family's possession have repeatedly come into the art market. Three paintings that achieved particularly high prices at auctions caused a sensation. In 1987, the auction house Sotheby’s auctioned the painting Irises by Vincent van Gogh for 53.9 million dollars - at the time the highest price ever achieved for a painting at auction. Joan Whitney Payson acquired this work, now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, in 1947 for only $ 84,000. Two years later, Walter Annenberg bought the painting Au Lapin Agile by Pablo Picasso from the heirs of Joan Whitney Paysons at Sotheby's . The painting, which sold for $ 40.7 million, is now in the Metropolitan Museum with the Annenberg Collection. On November 7, 2007, another work from the Payson collection was auctioned. Hong Kong billionaire Joseph Lau bought Paul Gauguin's Te Poipoi for $ 39,241,000 .

Paintings from the Joan Whitney Payson Collection

• 

  Lucas Cranach the Elder:
  Samson and Delilah

• 

  Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot:
  Toussaint Lemaistre

• 

  Édouard Manet:
  The Monet family in their garden in Argenteuil

• 

  Paul Cézanne:
  Bathers

• 

  Henri Rousseau:
  Two monkeys in the jungle

• 

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:
  Woman in the Garden of the Monsieur Forest

• 

  Paul Gauguin:
  Te Poipoi

• 

  Paul Signac:
  The Cassis pier

legacy

In addition to the cultural foundations, Joan Whitney Payson was involved in numerous other charitable fields, including health promotion and education. In 1943 she founded the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, named after her mother. This foundation initially supported medical research in the field of rheumatic fever , and later also in the field of connective tissue diseases . Today the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation is active in many fields of medical research. Together with her husband, Joan Whitney Payson donated the Payson Library to Pepperdine University in Malibu in 1972 . Her son had studied at this university in the 1960s.

Joan Whitney Payson died in 1975 at the age of 72. Her grave is in Pine Grove Cemetery in Falmouth , Maine.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rita Reif: Van Gogh's 'Irises' Sells for $ 53.9 million , New York Times, November 12, 1987.
2. ^ Rita Reif: Walter Annenberg Buys a Picasso Painting for $ 40.7 million , New York Times, November 16, 1989.
3. ↑ Carol Vogel: At Sotheby's Art Auction, Buyers Were Not Impressed , New York Times, November 8, 2007.

literature

• Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market , Random House, New York 1992, ISBN 0-679-40472-4 .

Web links

• Joan Whitney Payson's childhood home in New York City at nyc-architecture.com
• Internet presence of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation
• Payson Library website