Damien Hirst’s Net Worth Rose Nearly $20 Million Last Year, According to the Sunday Times’s ‘Rich List’

Hirst is one of only two artists to make the annual list of the 1,000 wealthiest people in the UK.

Damien Hirst. Photo by Billy Farrell, ©Patrick McMullan.

Artist Damien Hirst’s net worth rose by around $19.5 million over the past year, according to the Sunday Times’s annual “Rich List,” released this weekend.

The report, which ranks the 1,000 wealthiest people in the UK, estimated the artist’s fortune is around $410 million. That’s good enough to place him at number 405 on the Times’s list—five slots above his ranking last year, when he was valued at $390 million. The new total takes into account his $195 million in property, including an 18-bedroom London house overlooking Regent’s Park purchased for $57 million in 2014, and his 2,000-piece art collection, valued at $233 million. (The pretty penny he was recently paid for creating that $200,000-per-stay suite in Las Vegas’s Palms Casino probably didn’t hurt, either.)

The only other artist to crack the list independently is Anish Kapoor, who comes in at number 876 with a $175 million fortune, down from 862 in 2018. He and Hirst were also the only artists to make last year’s list, as well as the one before that.  

Frances Segelman, a 70-year-old sculptor known for her busts of English Royalty, made this year’s list as part of a couple. Her 93-year-old husband, the car and property magnate Sir Jack Petchey, whom she recently married, is ranked at number 268. The couple is estimated to be worth nearly $650 million.

Notably, Theresa Sackler and her family—who have come under fire for their family company Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis—made the list for the first time. Estimated to be worth $3.9 billion, the family tied for number 50. They are likely to remain in the mix in the future in light of their March decision to halt all philanthropic giving for the time being. 

Not surprisingly, a number of notable other art patrons are checkered throughout the list as well. Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, who became a British citizen in 2010, has donated millions to the Tate Modern and the Victoria & Albert Museum—and has structures at both institutions named after him—leads the bunch at number four, with an estimated net worth of $18.5 billion. Mega-collector Roman Abramovich comes in at number nine, up three slots from last year, with a fortune of $14.5 billion. 

Other noteworthy entries include investment titan Joe Lewis, the seller of last year’s record-shattering Hockney painting at Christie’s (he came in at number 30 with $5.6 billion); Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minster of Qatar who is believed to have been the anonymous buyer of Picasso’s $179.4 million  Les Femmes d’Alger in 2015 (number 69 with $2.6 billion); and Poju and Anita Zabludowicz, collectors of cutting-edge contemporary art (number 101 with $1.9 billion).

Also on the list: retired property investor David Lewis, who has assembled a sterling collection of Old Masters and 19th-century painting (339th place, with $505 million); David Roberts, a property magnate who runs his own art foundation (556, with $278 million); and advertising magnate and mega-collector Charles Saatchi (830, with $190 million).


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