Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen: The Swiss billionaire Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen Bornemisza, who died on April 27th aged 81, accumulated arguably the greatest private art collection in the world.
All his adult life, he invested his wealth in art to augment the collection he had inherited from his father.
In the early 1990s, realising that his collection of almost 800 paintings had outgrown his home in Lugano, Switzerland, he began to look for a new location. Spain won the day over stiff competition for a collection said to outstrip even that of Queen Elizabeth II. Both Prince Charles and Mrs Thatcher flew to Switzerland to put in a bid for Britain; President Mitterrand lobbied for France; the Getty Foundation offered millions of dollars for the US; and the Swiss government tried to block the paintings' export.
But, in 1993, the pressure of the bedroom decided matters in favour of the birthplace of the baron's fifth wife, Carmen "Tita" Cervera, a former beauty queen and widow of Tarzan Of The Apes actor Lex Barker. She negotiated with the Spanish government, who paid more than £241 million for the collection, and donated the Villahermosa palace in Madrid, near the Prado, to house it. The contract was for 10 years but, after further negotiations, it was agreed that the Villahermosa should became its permanent home.
Relations between "Baron Heini" and his older children, long tense, were aggravated after his marriage to Baroness Tita, who was once described by his daughter Francesca as "the wicked stepmother". Four years ago, he accused his oldest son, 52-year-old Georg (or Heini Jr), of negligence in the running of the family trust, which had been signed over to him five years earlier.
The baron launched court proceedings against Heini Jr to regain control of the billion-dollar holdings in the Bahamas. It was a case that threatened to enrich only the expensive lawyers employed by both sides; finally, last year, the two came to a private agreement.
Heinrich von Thyssen was born in Scheveningen, Holland, the fourth, and youngest, child of Heinrich von Thyssen, a wealthy German industrialist, and Margit Bornemisza, a Hungarian aristocrat. The family empire, founded on shipbuilding, coal, steel and iron, had been started by the baron's grandfather, August, who left his fortune to his two sons, Fritz and Heinrich, in 1926.
The grandfather was not a collector on the scale of his son and grandson, but was an admirer of Auguste Rodin, from whom he commissioned a set of six marble sculptures (they remain one of the gems of the collection). Relations between the brothers were acrimonious, with Fritz a sympathiser and financial supporter of the Nazis; his industrial interests would eventually form the basis of the Thyssen-Krupp group.
Heinrich Sr inherited August's love of art, along with the other financial benefits. He built up the collection with wise investments, buying at bargain-basement prices from American magnates ruined in the 1929 crash. Heinrich and his wife divorced in 1931, and 10-year-old Heini moved with his father to Switzerland, where they adopted Swiss nationality the following year.
Heini was only 26 when his father died in 1947, leaving his fortune, and 525 paintings and other art works, to his children. As the only sibling who had inherited their father's love of art, after an acrimonious court case Heini set about buying the collection back from his brother Stefan and sisters Margit and Gabrielle.
Heinrich Sr had invested heavily in art works up to the 18th century, but his son's interests favoured 19th- and 20th-century works; his purchases created a priceless collection, and a course in the history of art under a single roof. For many years, his vast wealth permitted him to take his place among the international jet-set, attending all the best parties and staying at the best hotels, while sitting on the boards of some 30 companies, many of them in IT and the technical sector.
Until his health began to fail, he and Baroness Tita continued this lifestyle, shuttling between their various mansions in Switzerland, three in Spain, Jamaica, Paris and London, which they filled with priceless and favoured paintings.
The baron is survived by Tita - his fifth wife and his five children.
Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszon: born 1921; died, April 2002