Barbara Piasecka Johnson

Barbara Piasecka Johnson was a Polish-American humanitarian, philanthropist, art connoisseur and collector. She was born in a small village near Grodno, Poland (now in Belarus) and graduated from Wroclaw University with a M.A. in Art History. She left Poland in 1968 with only $100 and moved to the United States, where she was hired as a cook and then a chambermaid by Esther Underwood Johnson, the second wife of John Seward Johnson I, the co-founder of Johnson & Johnson. She soon became his art curator and later his third wife, after he divorced Esther in 1971. She inherited the bulk of his fortune of $400 million after he died in 1983, excluding his six children from his will. She was involved in a long and bitter legal battle with his children, who claimed that their father was not mentally competent when he signed the will and that she had abused him. The case was settled out of court, with the children receiving about 12% of the estate and Barbara retaining the majority. She increased her wealth through investments and became one of the richest women in the world, with a net worth of $2.9 billion in 2011 according to Forbes. She converted the family estate in Princeton, New Jersey, into a golf course and named it Jasna Polana, after her childhood home in Poland. She was an avid art collector and owned works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Botticelli, Gentileschi, and many others. She also donated some of her artworks to museums and cultural institutions, especially in Poland. She founded the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Foundation in 1974, which supported various charitable causes, such as education, health, culture, and religion. She funded a school for autistic children in Gdańsk, a cancer diagnosis center in Legnica, a chapel in Jasna Góra, and many other projects. She spent the last years of her life in Poland, where she died of brain cancer in 2013 at the age of 76. She was buried in Wrocław, next to her parents.