Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die - that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice. He did less well with Old Master paintings, sometimes rashly employing his own judgment and sometimes influenced by insufficiently disinterested advisers. He founded a museum at his ranch house in Malibu in 1953, chiefly, it seems, out of a reluctance to pay taxes. For a long time public access was minimal. But in 1968 he decided to house the collection (which by then included an increasing number of Greek and Roman antiquities) in a reconstruction of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. He never saw the villa. And it was a surprise to the small staff when in 1976 the museum became the chief recipient of his enormous fortune.

LRB 4 January 2007 | PDF Download