Charles Bierer Wrightsman
Charles Bierer Wrightsman was an American oil executive and arts patron. His second wife, Jayne was also an arts patron.Personal life
Charles Bierer Wrightsman was born on June 13, 1895 in Pawnee, Oklahoma. He was the son of Charles John Wrightsman, an Oklahoma oilman and lawyer, and Edna Wrightsman. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford University, and Columbia University. He became president of Standard Oil of Kansas. He married twice, first to Irene Dill Stafford, with whom he had two daughters, Irene Wrightsman and Charlene Stafford Wrightsman the latter of which, like her father, would also marry twice, first to actor Helmut Dantine and second to newspaper columnist Igor Cassini. His second wife was the above-noted Jayne Kirkman Larkin.
Wrightsman died at his home on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on May 27, 1986.Art collection
On retirement, he used his money to buy artworks for his private collection and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, most notably donating Gerard David's Virgin and Child with Four Angels and Vermeer's Portrait of a Young Woman, along with works by El Greco, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Georges de La Tour, Rubens and Jacques-Louis David. He also funded the Museum's eight Wrightsman Rooms, furnished and decorated in the 18th century French style, and three further galleries for objets-d'art and furniture from that period.
He also successfully bid and paid $392,000 for Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was instead sold to the National Gallery in London to enable it to stay in the United Kingdom. He also had homes in London and Palm Beach at which he frequently hosted John F Kennedy.
