Earlier this month, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton raised $675,000 at its glitzy annual fund-raising gala—the last to take place in its present building. Meanwhile, a few miles away, in Water Mill, the skeleton of the Parrish’s new home, an elegant, barnlike building designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron that’s as long Read More
“I do have enough money to buy new frocks, don’t I, Terry?” Brooke Astor had once asked her longtime attorney, Henry “Terry” Christensen.
He thought she was joking.
Mr. Christensen, formerly a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented the wealthy socialite for half a century, had been Ms. Read More
“I knew I should have listened to that man; he told me you’re not my friend,” the late Brooke Astor told her close friend Annette de la Renta during a walk in Central Park sometime in 2001 or 2002.
Ms. Astor had just dropped the leashes for her two dogs, Boysie and Read More
“Good Lord, what’s happened to the picture?” wondered Lord William Waldorf Astor when he saw the empty wall space in Brooke Astor’s red-lacquered library, where her cherished Childe Hassam painting had hung.
For decades, the two Astors had visited each other across the Atlantic—two sides of the Read More
The late philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor had a “very nice, cordial relationship” with her son, Anthony Marshall, said Linda Gillies, longtime director of the now-defunct charitable foundation set up by Ms. Astor’s husband, Vincent Astor. “They spoke, they laughed together and they worked together.”
Yet, mother and son inevitably had their moments. Ms. Read More
The American painter Childe Hassam (1859-1935) enjoyed a very long and productive career. According to H. Barbara Weinberg, the curator of the exhibition Childe Hassam, American Impressionist , at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artist’s oeuvre totaled “more than two thousand oils, watercolors, and pastels and other drawings, as well as illustrations for articles Read More
