Lorinda Payson de Roulet<\/a>, the daughter of heiress and pioneering Mets founder Joan Whitney Payson.<\/p>\nDe Roulet died in October 2025 at age 95. Her mom \u2014 known as the \u201cMother of the Mets\u201d \u2014 became the first woman to own a major American sports franchise when she acquired 87% of the upstart Queens team in its inaugural season.<\/p>\n
She helped to heal a city and baseball fan base that had seen the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants flee to California in 1958.<\/p>\n
The family was known as much for its art acument as its love of baseball.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century,\u201d Max Carter, Christie\u2019s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, told The Post.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The family\u2019s love for the arts dates back generations. John Milton Hay, born in 1838, was Abraham Lincoln\u2019s personal secretary. Hay collected the sculptures of his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed the twenty-dollar gold coin, also known as the Double Eagle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hay\u2019s daughter, the poet and racehorse owner Helen Hay Whitney, married William Payne Whitney, brother-in-law to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Payson and her husband, Charles S. Payson, purchased the Renoir in 1929 for $100,000 \u2014 the equivalent of $1.9 million today.<\/p>\n
Payson\u2019s granddaughter, the heiress Whitney Bullock, 74, remembered visiting Payson\u2019s home on Long Island, and greeting the masterpiece in the living room.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d say \u2018Hi Renoir,\u2019 just to check if it was ok,\u201d Bullock told the Post in an exclusive interview, as she flipped through family photo albums. <\/p>\n
This Picasso painting was previously sold by de Roulet to fund her philanthropy. CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2026<\/p>\n
She recalled her grandparents throwing lavish \u201cthemed costume parties.\u201d One photo showed her grandfather dressed as Neptune, striding up a grand staircase \u2014 and passing Marc Chagall\u2019s\u00a0L\u2019Acrobate,\u00a0which is now on the block for an expected $700,000 to $1 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no idea growing up that I was supposed to be impressed,\u201d Bullock laughed. \u201cI really loved the Chagall. It brought joy to everybody.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The painters Payson hung on the walls of her Manhasset mansion were like a who\u2019s who of art history: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, El Greco, Paul Gauguin, Winslow Homer, and of course, Pablo Picasso.<\/p>\n
One Christmas, the Picasso \u2014\u00a0Au Lapin Agile \u2014\u00a0became the backdrop to the kids\u2019 game of Nerf darts.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when Bullock\u2019s mother, de Roulet, decided to sell it.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re gonna do something different with this now,\u201d she recalled her mom saying.<\/p>\n
A year later, she sold the Picasso for $40.7 million and used the proceeds to launch\u00a0The Patrina Foundation, which gives educational grants to women and girls.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Such charities \u201cwere the things mom most cared about,\u201d Bullock said.<\/p>\n
But the family legacy included diamonds \u2014 as in baseball diamonds.<\/p>\n
Lorinda de Roulet and daughter Sandra at Shea. CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2026<\/p>\n
Around 1915, Joan Whitney Payson began going with her mom, Helen Hay Whitney, to see the Giants play at the Polo Grounds. \u201cThe two of them being the only women there at the time,\u201d Bullock said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Payson later bought a 10% stake in the Giants, and even tried to stop owner Horace Stoneham from moving the team to San Francisco. <\/p>\n
So Payson went bigger \u2014 and the New York Mets were born.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went all the time. The whole family had a whole bunch of rows,\u201d Bullock raved of the old Shea Stadium. \u201cI was around for a lot of \u201969. I was there for the \u2018black cat game.\u2019 That\u2019s when we knew, it\u2019s gonna happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lorinda de Roulet died in October at age 95. CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2026<\/p>\n
She was referring to the famous scene on Sept. 9, 1969, when a black cat darted across the rival Chicago Cubs dugout at Shea, an omen many Mets fans believe foretold miracle World Series run.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bullock later worked in Mets PR and endured fury from the fans after the infamous Midnight Massacre, when Tom Seaver was dealt to the Cincinnati Reds in June 1977.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was the one who had to take all those phone calls by the very unhappy Mets fans. People were screaming at me,\u201d Bullock shuddered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the team was sold in 1980 to Nelson Doubleday Jr. and Fred Wilpon, both she and her mother, who had been running the day-to-day operations, were pushed out. She said current owner Steve Cohen has tried to restore the family\u2019s legacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Renoir and the other eight paintings up for auction will be on free public view at Christie\u2019s Rockefeller Center galleries from May 9 to May 18.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI hope that the paintings find happy homes,\u201d Bullock said as she closed the photo albums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Mets masterpiece is a lot prettier than this year\u2019s team so far. The blue-blood New York family…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1029,228,226,227,195,11957,229,88,1189,194],"class_list":{"0":"post-592819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-auctions","13":"tag-christies","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-new-york-mets","17":"tag-us-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}