Dame Jillian Sackler obituary

The art lover and philanthropist has died aged 84

Dame Jillian Sackler, 1940–2025. Photo: Miguel Benavides.

The philanthropist Dame Jillian Sackler, who has died on Tuesday, aged 84, from oesophageal cancer, was born in 1940 in Stoke, England. Her parents, Kenneth Tully and Doris Queenie Gillman Smith, met while working at the Midland bank. Jillian’s younger brother, Bryn Tully, died in 2019.

Dame Jillian was the captain of her local tennis club and loved to attend Wimbledon, where she met some of the great players, including Arthur Ashe. 

Jillian met Dr Arthur M Sackler in 1967 when he was visiting London from the US. At first, she was not interested in him, but he was persistent, and she was finally won over and agreed to move to the US to be with him. At that time, he was still married to his second wife, Marietta Lutze, although they had been legally separated since 1958. When Arthur’s divorce finally came through, he and Jill married the day after, 29 December 1980. They moved out of their small apartment to the house on Park Avenue, where Jillian continued to live until her death. The building was designed around the triplex apartment originally owned by the Vanderbilts, and was used by Jillian and Arthur as their primary residence and a place to entertain. Ambassadors, politicians, artists and singers, including Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and the dancer Martha Graham, were among the guests at the dinners given by Jillian.

Arthur was an avid art collector and connoisseur and Jillian shared his passion for art. Together with her husband, Jillian established the Arthur M Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Arthur M Sackler Museum at Harvard University, the Arthur M Sackler Science Center at Clark University, the Arthur M Sackler Center for Health Communications at Tufts University, the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University and the Arthur M Sackler Gallery and the Sackler Wing at The Metropolitan Museums of Art.

After Arthur’s death in 1987, Jillian tried to fulfil all his wishes and continue his philanthropic work. She was later made a Dame by the Queen for her philanthropy. With the income from Arthur’s estate and money she received from insurance, she went ahead with the Jillian and Arthur M Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University. She also went ahead with the Arthur M Sackler Colloquia at the National Academy of Sciences. Dame Jillian was the main benefactor of Studio International, supporting Studio from 1987 to the present, but never took credit or interfered with the content, allowing it to be a truly free speech platform for the arts – allowing diverse views and opinions was her main goal.

After establishing the first modern teaching museum in China in 1993, Jillian also established the Jill Sackler International Chinese Calligraphy Competition in which people from age five upwards can participate in renewing traditional skills. Judges and artists have included many master calligraphers, including Grand Master Chigon and Master Lu Bin Zen. Many years after the museum opened, the Dame Jillian Sackler International Artists Exhibition Program was created to honour her gift to China. Many international artists have participated and, in 2018, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the museum, an exhibition entitled Intersection: International Art and Culture was held. Contemporary artists from across the world participated, including Bao Pei, Cui Xiuwen, EV Day, Anindita Dutta, Mark Fox, Anita Glesta, Patricia Guzman, Nicolás Herrera, Maryam Najd, Frieder Nake, Toni Scott, Tai Xiangzhou, Xu Bing and Zhan Wang.

In the last 10 years, Jillian has fought tirelessly to keep her husband’s good name, writing to newspapers and magazines to make clear that Arthur was never part of the OxyContin scandal and that she and his descendants had not benefited financially from the drug, which was invented nine years after his death. As she told one newspaper in 2018: ‘I think he would not have approved of the widespread sale of OxyContin.’ He had bought Purdue Frederick in the 1950s and had given a third each to his two brothers, Mortimer and Raymond. In 1972, they would take control and cut him out. A new company was established by Mortimer and Raymond to produce and market their new pain medicine. A book, Arthur M Sackler: Biography and Family History, was written to establish the truth, but many used it to come up with false narratives. The book did not receive a single review by legacy media, but people who knew Arthur said it was a true account, as most of the content came from Dr Sackler’s own writings and contemporaneous notes from Jillian.

Jillian was chair of the Foreign Policy Association of the USA, from 2016 to 2020, the first woman to hold the position. The FPA Centennial was celebrated in 2018 in the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jillian was supported by co-chairs Daisy Soros and Sana H Sabbagh. For the FPA, she sponsored lectures on global health and recently established a Cultural Diplomacy Center at the FPA.

Jillian is survived by her nephew Richard Tully, her niece Victoria Tully Roberts and her cousins Fay Decreval, and Ashley, Catherine and Christine Hersh, and Clare and Katie Gordon Smith in England.

• Dame Jillian Sackler, art lover and philanthropist, born 17 November 1940; died 20 May 2025.