Annamaria Edelstein, beat inflation by investing British Rail’s pension fund in 2,400 works of art

In 1974 British Rail agreed to invest 3 per cent of its £ 1.3 billion pension fund in art, setting up a sub-company, Lexbourne, for acquisitions, with Annamaria Edelstein in charge. She organised a panel of experts from Sotheby’s and the wider London art world to pick the best across the range of the art market at a boom time for great sales.

As she told James Stourton in Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market 1945-2000, “I never had so many friends” – a wry comment on the way many dealers, especially those who had been most fawning, later dropped her the moment she ceased to wield such power and influence.

Anonymous agents were appointed by her to bid secretly so that sellers could not guess British Rail’s interest and inflate prices. She thoroughly enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger aspect of all this.  She sometimes got annoyed when Lewin, acting in British Rail’s interests, turned down masterpieces on which she had set her heart, including a painting by Guercino which went to the National Gallery instead.

Nevertheless, over the five-year buying period, she acquired spectacular objects such as the record-breaking English bronze Romanesque candlestick from the von Hirsch collection, a notorious Tang horse and a Riesener console table from Marie-Antoinette’s apartment at Versailles, which made huge profits when re-sold, as did Renoir’s La Promenade which went in due course to the Getty Museum in Malibu.

Not everything did as well; tribal art and coins, for instance, failed to live up to expectations. But as the Wall Street Journal observed, “every one of the 13 categories of art invested in by the pension fund brought more money when sold than the fund had paid”.

By 1980, she had spent £40 million on 2,400 paintings and objects. The collection was lent to various British museums, but although the intention had been to hold on to the investments for at least 20 years, the art was re-sold in batches from 1987 onwards when British Rail was “privatised” and management and priorities changed. (Running an efficient train service has never been one of them.)

The experiment was judged to have raised £170 million for the pension fund, a return of over 11 per cent a year – comfortably beating inflation, if not quite equities.

She was born Annamaria Succi in Milan on December 6 1935 to Mario Succi, a banker, and his Sicilian wife Maria Teresa Mormina. Her parents separated when she was small, and her mother started a fashion house in Milan called Silhouette.

Annamaria was educated at a convent, and at her father’s urging studied accountancy at college, when she would have preferred art. She came to London in the 1950s to study English, and later lived in Paris for a time, working in the legal department of the Ministry of Agriculture as an editor and proof-reader. Eloquent in whichever language she was speaking, she liked to pepper her sentences with evocative Italian words like “sfortunatamente”.

In 1961 she met and later married Iain Macdonald, a Shell executive based in Milan. They settled in London, but his work soon took to them to Glasgow, then Birmingham. When she saw the last of these at the peak of its 1960s architectural self-vandalism, she burst into tears and wondered what she had done for God to punish her by sending her to the third circle of hell.

They divorced and in 1969 she met Victor Edelstein at Felix Hope-Nicholson’s house in Tite Street, where a friend in common, the icon painter Slobodan Paich, was a lodger. In 1973 Annamaria and Victor embarked on a hugely successful marriage that would last over 50 years, during which time Victor Edelstein became the leading English couturier of the 1980s, the “Oscar de la Renta of London”, famous for his creations for Diana Princess of Wales.

Annamaria herself was noted for her wonderful clothes and jewels – jade, amber, amethysts and Italian pectoral crosses – and the decoration of her and Victor’s successive houses were manifestations of their shared sense of style.

After London, they lived in Spain for a time, and then in considerable splendour near the Church of the Assumption in Venice for 12 years, but latterly, finding the heat of the Venetian summer and the volume of Chinese tourists unbearable, they moved to a converted stable block at Sherborne in Gloucestershire.

After leaving the British Rail pension fund, she had spent a decade as a successful London dealer in Old Master drawings, based in Jermyn Street, where her offbeat good taste came to the fore, then from 1995 she became a professional painter, principally of still lifes and landscapes, exhibiting a dozen times in London, Milan, Venice and Sherborne. At home, she and Victor would spend their days painting with their easels side-by-side.

Annamaria was also a fine cook, noted for her dashing Anglo-Italian recipes such as casserole of venison and turnips: chopped, rolled in flour and myriad herbs, covered in a bottle of wine and cooked for hours in a green lard-lined Le Creuset pot. She never bothered to measure her ingredients. When someone asked how she managed to get he​r soufflé to rise so well, she quipped that she could get a rise out of anything except Sotheby’s, referring to her meagre salary there.

She is survived by her husband Victor.

Annamaria Edelstein, born December 6 1935, died December 22 2024​

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