Huguette Clark, the copper mining heiress and daughter of ex-US Senator William A Clark, has left her considerable fortune to art.
In her will Clark left $400 million of her inheritance amassed by her father from the Montana mining industry to the purpose of fostering and promoting the arts.
Ms Clark passed away last month on May 24, 2011.
She gave the Washington Corcoran Gallery of Art the Claude Monet water lily painting as well. The painting has not been displayed in public since 1925. The painting was completed by Monet in 1907 and is worth millions of dollars.
She was 98 when she signed the will in the year 2005. Now the Manhattan district attorney’s office has initiated a probe into how her affairs were managed while she spent the last two decades of her life in a hospital.
Other priceless works of art which include originals by Renoir, John Singer Sargent and other great artists will be moved from the Fifth Avenue home in New York to the 24 acre ocean front estate she owned in Santa Barbara in California called Bellosguardo. The new Bellosguardo Foundation had been instructed to convert the estate into a museum.
The will has been challenged by distant relatives whom she left nothing to. The biggest individual beneficiary is her long time private nurse, Hadassah Peri, who is to receive about 60 percent of what's left of about $100 million not going to the foundation, after estate taxes take away at least 10 percent of the fortune.