She, however, had recently decided to make it her life’s work. She had plenty of other options: although she wasn’t as wealthy as her uncle Solomon, who would go on to found the New York museum named after him, she had plenty of money. Peggy’s father, Benjamin, had gone down with the Titanic, and in 1919, aged 21, she inherited a sum equivalent to around £34m today. At 39, she didn’t need to work at all – she could have spent her days playing golf at the Westchester Country Club, as her sister Hazel said later. Or, she could have spent more time with her children, Sindbad and Pegeen – she had recently been living in a picture-postcard cottage in Hampshire, and had enjoyed being burrowed away there. Or she might have devoted herself to her love affairs, which were legendary: indeed it had been her latest amour, the writer Samuel Beckett, who had urged her to focus on contemporary – “living”, as he put it – art, rather than the works of those who were dead.
