Remembering Jayne Wrightsman
It must have been in September of —a few weeks after I had arrived at the Metropolitan Museum—that I received the invitation (I viewed it more as a summons) to lunch at Fifth Avenue. Fresh from graduate school and already feeling awkward in my new position as assistant curator, I was at once excited and intimidated. Even if you were a young, aspiring academic, disinterested in the social lives of the rich and famous, and ignorant of the lore of the Museum, the Wrightsman name commanded attention. Erwin Panofsky’s study of the iconography of Titian’s paintings - required reading for every student of Renaissance art—had its origin as a series of lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts sponsored by the Wrightsmans. So, too, did Francis Haskell’s marvellous book, Rediscoveries in Art (a book I return to often). Luckily, the invitation was for an informal lunch rather than a dinner. Still, from the moment Mary and I stepped out of the cab, I felt a little like Dorothy waking in the land of Oz. But there was no need for this anxiety. A seasoned hostess able to put one at ease, Jayne was incredibly gracious, and I seem to recall in a vague way that the conv
Jayne Wrightsman, arts patroness and society stalwart, dies
Shannon Donnelly | sdonnelly@
Jayne Wrightsman, a patroness and benefactor who steered Palm Beach and New York society with a quiet but able hand, died Saturday, April 20, , at her Manhattan residence.
She was 99 and the widow of Charles Wrightsman.
Born Jane Kirkman Larkin on Oct. 21, , in Flint, Mich., she was one of four children of Frederick Larkin, head of a construction company, and his wife, Aileen.
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Her parents divorced when she was 12, after which Aileen Larkin moved her brood to Los Angeles, where Jane re-named herself "Jayne" and graduated from Los Angeles High School.
Beautiful and popular, she made a living as a swimsuit model and a department store clerk while enjoying an active social life, being wooed by actors, playboys, and heirs who took her to expensive restaurants and A-list parties.
It was at one of those parties that she met Oklahoman Charles Wrightsman, a divorced father of two and a dashing, socially rising adventurer who flew airplanes and played polo. He was also the president of Standard Oil of Kansas.
They were married on Mar
«It is with sadness that the Museum announces the death of the legendary Jayne Wrightsman, who, with her late husband, Charles, was among The Met's most important benefactors. Their generosity is honored in Charles and Jayne Wrightsman and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a new online feature with essays that pay tribute to the ways in which the couple helped shape The Met collection through their financial support and extraordinary gifts of works of art. One such gift, the elegant gold-and-white Neoclassical room from the Hôtel de Cabris, is among the most beautiful and evocative spaces in the Museum. »
An Italian architect designed the building, and a French sculptor supervised the interior decoration of the Hôtel de Cabris, located in the town of Grasse in southern France. The owner of the new townhouse was Jean-Paul de Clapiers, third marquis de Cabris (–). The young, recently married aristocrat never actually lived there, however. Before the house was finished, he was declared legally insane and incarcerated, while his wife took refuge in a convent. A inventory indicates that the inside of the Hôtel de Cabris was in disarray and that this boiserie, or woodwor
JAYNE&#;S WORLD
October 3,
The opening-night concert of the Carnegie Hall season was about to begin. That music would resume, that the Berlin Philharmonic had not canceled— these were hopeful symbols to a city still shattered less than a month after the terrorist attacks of September The late arrival of Peter Jennings seemed to cause a collective sigh of relief: reassurance, perhaps, that there would be no late-breaking crisis that night.
No seat remained empty; New York's elite filled the hall: music as elixir, but also as social draw. ("I hate opera, but I love my wife," financier Saul Steinberg once famously remarked.) The mood was highly charged, though the audience itself looked subdued, with few of the glittering necklaces and important brooches that signify, in that rarefied world at least, the ebb and flow of affluence. In their stead: the severe, driven chic intrinsic to a certain echelon of New York society and which seemed, that night, more than usually appropriate.
After the audience joined in an emotional chorus of "God Bless America," it leapt to its feet to applaud Daniel Rodriguez, the Police Department tenor who had sung it onstage.
Among those who
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