Beverly Whitney Kean (1921–2011)

Beverly Whitney Kean, née Sutherland, was born in Toronto, Canada, and brought up by her mother and stepfather Park Hamilton Whitney Thomson, whose family name she later adopted as her stage name. She attended the Bishop Strachan School and studied singing in Toronto before moving to New York City. She joined the San Francisco Light Opera Company and then won starring roles in two 1944 Hollywood movies, Ladies of Washington and Irish Eyes Are Smiling. She moved on to the new medium of television and appeared as a guest star in a dozen TV series, made commercials, and sang in supper clubs. She married Benjamin Kean, a successful physician. In 1959, after their divorce, she travelled to the USSR as one of the first Western tourists allowed to visit. After being stunned by the collection of modern French paintings in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, she decided to write a book about Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, the two great Russian art collectors who had originally commissioned and purchased them. Official Soviet history had wiped their names from the record after the Russian Revolution. She spent more than 20 years researching, traveling, interviewing, and writing for her book, All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (1983), still the definitive account. It was banned in the USSR for many years. In 1990, she married again to Gerhard Hess, a professor of sociology and international education at the State University of New York, and divided her time between their Manhattan apartment, her husband's German family home, and a flat in a Scottish castle.