J Richardson Dilworth

J. Richardson Dilworth, a philanthropist and retired financier who was a former chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., died in December 1997. He was 81 and lived in Princeton. He was a senior financial adviser to the Rockefeller family for 23 years. At his death, Mr. Dilworth was on the board of directors of AEA Incorporated, a private investment company which he had helped to found. He discovered the Metropolitan Museum as a little boy growing up in Manhattan. As an adult, he became chairman of the finance committee of the museum's board of trustees, and a vice president and then vice chairman of the board before becoming chairman. Mr. Dilworth resigned as chairman in 1987 because of illness. From 1981 to 1986, he was also chairman of the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. He was the institute's president from 1970 to 1981 and a trustee from 1964 to 1986. Mr. Dilworth was also a member of the Yale Corporation -- Yale University's board of trustees -- from 1959 to 1986. For the last 13 of those years he was the board's leader, with the title of Senior Fellow. From 1960 to 1991, he was a trustee of what is now Rockefeller University. From 1952 to 1958, he was a partner and then a managing partner in the Manhattan-based investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and he went on to be associated with the Rockefeller family, and with various Rockefeller interests, in a variety of roles, from 1958 to 1994. Mr. Dilworth was the senior financial adviser to the Rockefeller family from 1958 until 1981. And he was a longtime director of Rockefeller Center and from 1966 to 1982 its chairman. He was also a director of Chrysler Corporation, R. H. Macy & Company, the Squibb Corporation and more than a dozen other companies and financial institutions. Joseph Richardson Dilworth was born in Hewlett, N.Y., on Long Island, the son of Dewees Wood Dilworth -- an investment banker -- and Edith Logan Dilworth. He was a nephew and near-namesake of Richardson Dilworth, the Mayor of Philadelphia from 1955 to 1962. He attended the Buckley School in Manhattan and St. Mark's School in Southborough, Mass. In 1938, he graduated from Yale College, where he belonged to Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1942 from Yale Law School. During World War II, he was a Navy staff officer in the Pacific and elsewhere. Mr. Dilworth is survived by his wife, the former Elizabeth McKay Cushing; two sons, Joseph R. Jr. of Sagaponack, N.Y., and Charles Dewees Dilworth of San Francisco; a daughter, Alexandra Cushing Dilworth of Montalcino, Italy; seven grandchildren and a sister, Diana D. Wantz of Manhattan.