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The Sunday Read: ‘The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty’

The Sunday Read: ‘The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty’

The Daily vor 3 Jahren

0:00

56:57

Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the
Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was
trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a
lawyer to stop them.

She explained that her late husband had been a breeder of
champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the
racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein,
gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth
Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her
lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows
in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a
woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors.
Daniel, 16 years Sylvia’s senior, already had two grown sons when
they met, and he didn’t want more children. So over the next 40
years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they
were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in
2001, he left her a small stable.

Then, one morning about a year later, Sylvia’s phone rang. It was
her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something
odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of
Sylvia’s stable were no longer listed under her name. The French
journalist Magali Serre’s 2013 book “Les Wildenstein” recounts
the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and
flipped to the page. Sure enough, the stable of “Madame
Wildenstein” had been replaced by “Dayton Limited,” an Irish
company owned by her stepsons.

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