Art collector Huguette Clark leaves prime Monet to Corcoran but sets up museum in Santa Barbara

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Paintings by the likes of Renoir, John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase that have long been held in private hands will form the core of a new museum in Santa Barbara.

Basic instructions for the museum were revealed Wednesday in the last will and testament of art collector Huguette Clark, who died at age 104 last month in New York. The daughter of U.S. Senator William A. Clark, she had a 42-room apartment on Fifth Avenue full of art, books and musical instruments at the time of her death.

She willed one especially famous painting, a 1907 ‘Water Lilies’ canvas by Claude Monet, to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Perhaps it will be displayed in the Clark Wing, named after her father, who left his entire collection there.) But she specified that her other paintings and artifacts be shown at her $100-million, 24-acre estate in Santa Barbara, soon to be a museum.

The museum will be called, like her estate, Bellosguardo, meaning ‘beautiful view.’ For more on Huguette Clark’s will, see L.A. Now.

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-- Jori Finkel
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