Evangeline Johnson Merrill; Arts Patron

Evangeline Johnson Merrill, 93, a patron of the arts and the last surviving child of Johnson & Johnson co-founder Robert Wood Johnson. She served with the Red Cross during World War I and was decorated by President Woodrow Wilson, fought the city of Palm Beach, Fla., over a 1920s ban on women’s abbreviated bathing suits and in 1938 married conductor Leopold Stokowski. (To protest the bathing suit ban, she had dropped handbills from a small plane she had just learned to fly.) Mrs. Merrill became a prominent figure in the arts. In 1943, she was made a fellow in perpetuity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she was a patron of the Peabody Museum of Yale University. She and Stokowski were divorced and she later married a Russian nobleman, Prince Zalstem-Zalesky, who died in 1965. Her surviving husband is Charles Merrill. In Hendersonville, N.C., on Sunday.