Sub-title: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune and their Great and Influential Art Collection and their Forty-Year Feud
The topic of this book fascinated me as I used to make all of my own clothes and loved sewing. Edward Clark was the business person that partnered with Isaac Singer and ended up owning over half of the company. He had only one son, Alfred, who had four sons. Two of Alfred's son's, Robert Sterling Clark and Stephen Clark were art collectors. Sterling left a foundation that today is valued at $98 million. His brother Stephen's descendants administer The Clark Foundation which is estimated to have funds in excess of $440 million. The lives of people with those staggering sums at their disposal always seem to go astray in each succeeding generation, and this family was no exception.
Unfortunately, the book is not about their lives as much as it is about the art they collected and left to museums, the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum in New York and Yale University's collection.
The author is a well-known art expert and describes the paintings they acquired and gave away. I found it quite fawning, as if he was flattering the current generation for donations as he repeatedly described how wonderful it was for them to share their paintings - without mentioning the tax breaks they likely got for doing so.
It was worth reading but I could have skipped large parts and I still feel I didn't really get to know the Clarks.
Published: 2007 Read: August 2018 Genre: biography
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