Jacob Rothschild: The subject of Freud’s “Man in a Chair” has died aged 87

Jacob Rothschild was one of the few people to have been painted by both Lucien Freud and David Hockney, and the only person to have commissioned a giant folly for his ancestral estate shaped like a wedding cake and called Wedding Cake – but which he preferred to think of as a temple. Rothschild’s death at the age of 87 was announced yesterday but he will be long remembered, and not only as the financier who built a number of successful companies including St James’s Place and RIT Capital Partners after parting ways from the family bank in 1991. He was a collector, philanthropist and restorer of grand houses including Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, where he lived in a former tea pavilion next door to the main chateau. “He made the very most of the privilege he was born into,” the British Museum chairman and former chancellor George Osborne wrote yesterday. He kept a 15,000-bottle wine cellar and – full disclosure – was an enthusiastic supporter of Tortoise. Not that he liked to be the story. On the contrary, he once told an FT interviewer: “If you decide to write anything, I’d rather it wasn’t about me.”