His 34 bronze statuettes, from the 15th to the early 18th centuries, are on view through June 15 at the Frick Collection, a museum founded by earlier-era financier Henry Clay Frick. They are valued at more than $70 million, according to people familiar with the works.
Hill’s 1612-14 canvas by Rubens of a battle commander hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where Hill is a trustee. The Rubens fetched 9 million pounds at Christie’s in London in 2010. Its current value could range from 15 million pounds to 20 million pounds, according to Johnny Van Haeften, a London-based art dealer. The Hills have promised a gift to the Met of the 14th-century resurrection scene by Giovanni da Milano, said Elyse Topalian, a Met spokeswoman.
“I don’t know many collectors who can spread their wings over that kind of time frame,” Richard Feigen, a New York art dealer who has known the Hills professionally and socially since the 1990s, said in an interview. “As collectors they are more sophisticated than most museums. In order for them to like something, it has to be world class.”
Blackstone Billionaires
Hill is the fifth billionaire to be minted at Blackstone. The company was started in 1985 by Steven Schwarzman and Peter G. Peterson, who left the firm in 2008 to pursue philanthropic causes. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chairman, has a net worth of $10.7 billion and is the world’s 114th-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Tony James, Blackstone’s president, has a stake valued at more than $1.1 billion and sold more than $275 million of Blackstone stock since the firm’s 2007 initial public offering. Hill has collected more than $300 million in share sales, dividends and compensation since 2006. Jonathan Gray, the 44- year-old who runs the company’s real-estate business, emerged as a billionaire last year.
Blackstone has been the most successful of the large private-equity firms to expand beyond leveraged buyouts, gathering assets under management of $272 billion.
Harvard Graduate
The firm’s stakes in companies from Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. to Pinnacle Foods Inc. have soared since the financial crisis as Blackstone improved operations and unprecedented central bank stimulus across the world inflated the price of real estate, stocks and art.
Hill’s business investing in and backing hedge funds has more than doubled since 2008 to $58 billion. Gray’s real estate group is also the largest of its type in the world with $81 billion and the firm has a $66 billion credit unit.