Peggy Guggenheim was absolutely stinking rich. Not quite as rich as she might have been if her father had not left the family business; not rich enough to collect Old Masters as Bernard Berenson wished she had done; but rich enough to indulge a whim for modern art which subsequently developed into a genuine passion and resulted in the magnificent collection she has left to us at the Palazzo Venier de Leoni in Venice.

There is more than a touch of the Poor-Little-Rich-Girl about her story. Her childhood, she says, was ghastly, 'excessively lonely and sad'. She was frequently separated from her adored sister, Benita, and from her father who in any case drowned on