The Longer This Estate Squabble Lasts, the Richer the Heirs Get!

What did people do before television? They read The Saturday Evening Post. And they cherished the Americana pictured on the Post's covers, most famously by Norman Rockwell.

Rockwell and the Post's art director, Ken Stuart, became good buddies. Over the years Stuart took more than a dozen Rockwell paintings home with him.

So what happens now that Post covers by Rockwell are worth millions? An estate battle that seems to have everything, including an elderly, "cognitively impaired" testator, three feuding sons, and charges that one son dipped into the estate to live well at his siblings' expense.

Plus a unique feature. according to this report in The New York Times. Though assorted lawyers are surely getting richer as the fight drags on, so are the three feuding heirs, thanks to the skyrocketing value of Rockwell's Post cover paintings, such as "Saying Grace," shown here.

When the urbane Mr. Stuart died in 1993, he left everything to his three sons — Ken Jr., William and Jonathan — in equal shares. The artwork was the crown jewel of an otherwise middle-class man’s estate, and by all rights, dividing three paintings among three brothers ought not to have been hard.

But two of the brothers, William and Jonathan, have spent 13 years fighting in court against their older brother, Ken Jr., saying that he took advantage of their ailing father, forcing him to sign papers to gain control of the entire fortune. The younger Stuarts charge that Ken Jr., who has been self-employed since 1991, used estate assets to enrich himself at their expense and support a lifestyle that included alimony for his first wife, a $5,000 Rolex for his soon-to-be second wife, $44,500 for a cello and bow for his daughter, and a $16,000 time-share for himself in New Orleans.

A judge ruled largely in Jonathan and William’s favor in 2004, but Ken Jr. has appealed. He contends the money he took was “for services rendered” and has also filed for bankruptcy protection. The only way his brothers will get paid, he says, is by selling the paintings, which they are resisting.

This epic family feud has ambled through five different courts, piling up more than 20,000 pages of documentary evidence. But unlike other situations in which litigation begets litigation and only the lawyers win, the longer the brothers squabble, the richer they all get, as the art increases in value. Last month, the owner of “Breaking Home Ties,” thought to be the second-most popular Rockwell cover after “Saying Grace,” had it auctioned by Sotheby’s. The painting fetched a record $15.4 million.

The remnants of the Curtis Publishing Company must have changed hands more than once since the Post's heyday. Some years back, the current owners sought to recover the paintings Rockwell had presumably sold to the Post's publisher. Too late, says the NY Times: "In September, a federal judge said that Curtis had waited too long to cry foul . . . ."