The A&P grocery heir died in the Bahamas at the age of 97, his daughter Juliet said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. It appears he died of natural causes Monday at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau.

Huntington Hartford “wanted to be thought of like a philosopher or a thinker,” Juliet told the A.P. He was once ranked among the world’s richest people and architect Frank Lloyd Wright once named him “the sort of man who will come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny and run,” Washington Post reports.

Hartford owned and developed the “Paradise Island” in the Bahamas, which was originally called “Hof Island.” He also published “Show” magazine from 1961 to 1972 and built the unique Gallery of Modern Art in New York, which showed the paintings of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. Hartford disliked the “vulgar” and “meaningless” extremes of modern abstract art and condemned “obscurity, confusion, immorality, violence” in contemporary painting. He promoted what he called “realistic art” of an earlier period.

In the 1950s, the A&P was the largest grocer worldwide. Next to General Motors, A&P managed to sell more goods than any other company in the world did.

In later years, Hartford lived quietly in Bahamas on the last of his millions from a trust that was administered for him. He filed for bankruptcy in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1992.

His funeral was scheduled for Friday at a Nassau church.