Joseph Hirshhorn

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Joseph Herman Hirshhorn (1899 - 1981) was a financier and art collector. Originally from Courland, Latvia, Hirshhorn emigrated to the United States with his widowed mother at the age of six.

Hirshhorn made his fortune in the oil industry and amassed a collection of paintings and sculptures from the 19th and 20th centuries. He later donated his collection, one of the world's largest private art collections, to the United States government. The government established the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in 1966 to hold the collection of six thousand pieces; the museum opened in 1974.

A shrewd investor, he reportedly sold off his Wall Street investments two months before the collapse of 1929. In the 1930s, he focused much of his attention on gold and other mining opportunities in Canada, establishing an office in Toronto in 1933.

In the 1950s, he and geologist Franc Joubin were primarily responsible for the "Big Z" uranium discovery in northeastern Ontario and the subsequent founding of Elliot Lake, Ontario. Probably not coincidentally, Hirshhorn Avenue spans the highest point of land in that city.

[edit] See also

• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution