Chauncey Stillman

Chauncey Devereux Stillman (November 9, 1907 – January 24, 1989) was an American philanthropist, art collector, conservationist, and banking heir. As one biographer noted, "He was one of the richest men of his generation, but he was never idle or indolent."

He founded the Homeland Foundation, which later became the Wethersfield Foundation in support of Wethersfield Estate & Gardens in Dutchess County, New York, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Early life Stillman was born in New York City to an affluent Episcopalian family. Two of his father's sisters married sons of William Rockefeller Jr. James Stillman was also a philanthropist and yachtsman. He was also the senior class odist, penning his class ode and reading it at the graduation ceremony. While he was at college, his mother, father, and brother all died of different causes.

Career Stillman served as a director of Freeport Minerals Company (later Freeport–McMoRan), beginning in December 1931.

In 1937, he founded, underwrote, and was president of Free America, Inc. and edited the monthly magazine Free America with Ralph Borsodi and Herbert Agar. He later served as a staff officer with the United States National Security Council. A short time later, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency through 1951. Around 1962, he endowed the Stillman Chair for Catholic Studies at Harvard University.

He was a director of the National Audubon Society, a director of the New York Botanical Garden from 1946 to 1969, and a trustee of the New York Zoological Society for almost thirty years. "Book Review: The Long Night." The North American Review. vol. 242, number 2 (1936): 438–441. Air Group 20: An Unofficial Portrayal of Carrier Air Group Twenty, 1949. The Annigoni Frescoes At Wethersfield House. Amenia, New York: Chauncey Devereux Stillman, 1973. "Christopher Dawson Recollections from America." The Chesterton Review, vol. 9, number 2 (1983): 143–148.

Honors

Stillman was listed in Who's Who in America. In 1931, the gates of Dunster House at Harvard University were given by Stillman in memory of his father, Charles Chauncey Stillman The Chauncey Stillman Professor of Sephardic Law and Ethics of Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel, was created in his honor by the Homeland Foundation in 2005. Goodspeed Musicals' Chauncey Stillman Production Facility in East Haddam, Connecticut, was named in his honor.

Personal life Stillman married Theodora Moran Jay of New York City on January 21, 1939, in a chapel in her grandmother's house. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Morgan and DeLancey Kane Jay of Long Island, New York, and a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States. She retained custody of their two daughters and received an "extremely large property settlement" in a sealed agreement. However, his collection also included works by James E. Buttersworth, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Nicolas Lancret, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. There, he built Wethersfield, a country estate near Amenia, New York. He named his estate after his family's first home in America in 1705—Wethersfield, Connecticut.

When he was 45 years old, Stillman converted to Catholicism. He said, “In 1952, I joined the Catholic Church after three decades of deliberation." In the 1980s, he established the Wethersfield Institute in Manhattan, to sponsor religious seminars.

In 1989, Stillman died of lung cancer in his apartment in New York City at the age of 82 years. He left Wethersfield and much of his personal art collection to the Homeland Foundation. Wethersfield opened to the public shortly after his death and is now managed by the nonprofit Wethersfield Foundation, Inc. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

To help expand the foundation's reach, Portrait of a Halberdier was sold at auction in 1989 to the Getty Museum for $34 million, then the highest price ever paid for an old master. In 1998, the foundation's assets totaled $103 million. However, over the next seventeen years, the foundation's trustees overspent and misappropriated funds, resulting in a balance of just $31 million. Stillman's heirs stepped in and the foundation sold more paintings to be able to preserve Wethersfield.