George Huntington Hartford II (April 18, 1911 – May 19, 2008) was an American businessman, philanthropist, stage and film producer, and art collector.

[2] He owned Paradise Island[3] in the Bahamas, and had numerous other business and real estate interests over his lifetime including the Oil Shale Corporation (TOSCO),[4] which he founded in 1955.

In 1940, Hartford invested $100,000 (equivalent to approximately $2,174,822 in 2023[12]) to help start a newspaper, PM, with Marshall Field III and worked as a reporter for the publication.

[13] After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and attempted to purchase Republic Pictures and RKO Studios from Howard Hughes.

[2] In the 1950s, Hartford purchased a penthouse duplex on the 13th and 14th floors of One Beekman Place in the 1950s after moving from an apartment at the River House in New York City.

He owned a home called "Pompano" on 240 El Vedado Drive in Palm Beach, a 150-acre (0.61 km2) estate in Mahwah, New Jersey, called "Melody Farm", a 160-acre (0.65 km2) Hollywood estate known as "The Pines" (also known as Runyon Canyon Park), a townhouse in London, a home in Juan-les-Pins in France, and a house on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

During this period, he also wrote and produced The Master of Thornfield, a stage adaptation of Jane Eyre that ran for two weeks in Cincinnati starring Errol Flynn as Mr. Rochester.

One feature of his Ocean Club was a cloister built from the disassembled stones of a monastery that William Randolph Hearst had stored in a Florida warehouse.

[14] In an interview with David Frost on British television, Hartford stated that the flag he created for Paradise Island was in the shape of a "P" and that he wanted to put it on the moon as a symbol of peace for the world.

[18] Hartford was responsible for getting the gambling license for Paradise Island by hiring Sir Stafford Sands, a Bahamian lawyer.

In 1969, Hartford produced the Broadway show Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, which opened at the Belasco Theater starring the then-unknown actor Al Pacino.

He criticized Abstract Expressionists, believing they had ushered in a great "ice age of art," freezing out the grand traditions of music, painting and sculpture; he described Pablo Picasso as a "mountebank".

[20] Beyond expressionism, he derided the "beatnik, the Existentialist, the juvenile delinquent, the zaniest of abstract art, the weirdest aberrations of the mentally unbalanced, the do-nothing philosophy of Zen Buddhism" as a result of wanton "abuse of liberty and freedom.

"[20] He had strong opinions against the work of Tennessee Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Willem de Kooning, as well as art dealer Sidney Janis.

[20] To support the art that he enjoyed, Hartford built an artists' colony in Rustic Canyon, above the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.

When it opened in 1951, it had more than a dozen cottages and a central dining room for distinguished artists, composers and craftspeople who won scholarships for one to six-month retreats.

[20] For nearly 15 years, more than 400 colony artists generated international success with exhibitions, concerts, theater performances and Pulitzer Prizes; included among them were composers Ernst Toch, Norma Wendelburg, and Ruth Shaw Wylie, writer and activist Max Eastman, and painter Edward Hopper.

For ten years the Hartford Theater was Los Angeles's premier venue for Broadway-scale productions featuring the stars of the time.

Hartford was a patron of the architect Edward Durell Stone who designed the modernist marble-clad structure often derided as the "lollipop building".