William Goetz - Hobbies

Hobbies

A very wealthy man, Goetz raised thoroughbred racehorses. His horse Your Host won the 1950 Santa Anita Derby and subsequently sired Kelso, a Hall of Fame inductee and one of the greatest horses in racing history.

Goetz and his wife also were major investors in art, acquiring a significant collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works. They owned paintings and sculptures by great artists such as Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and Henri Fantin-Latour. In 1949, a controversy erupted over a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait called "Study by Candlelight" that Goetz had purchased two years earlier. The painting was declared a fake by art expert Willem Sandberg and the artist's nephew, V. W. van Gogh, resulting in an international debate amongst art experts. The painting remained controversial and was not put up for auction with the rest of the Goetz collection following Mrs. Goetz's death in 1987.