David Gilmour, a Canadian-born entrepreneur who in the 1990s built a luxury resort on Wakaya, a tiny island he owned in Fiji, and then created Fiji Natural Artesian Water, turning a local resource into a leading bottled brand, died on June 11 in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said David Roth, a friend and business partner.

By the time he bought Wakaya from two business partners in 1987, Mr. Gilmour had built several businesses over 30 years. He imported Scandinavian home furnishings and built high-end stereos. He helped assemble a chain of hotels in the South Pacific, which made him familiar with the archipelago nation of Fiji, and he co-founded a gold-mining company.

But there was something different about Wakaya. At the time, he was mourning the death of his only child, Erin Gilmour, who had been murdered in her apartment in Toronto in 1983.

He called the island “the last bastion of sanity in the world,” his wife, Jillian (Sweeney) Gilmour, said in a phone interview. “He thought when everything went kerflooey, this is where he would go.

“The island itself is so beautiful,” she continued. “There’s an area called Chieftain’s Leap, with soaring cliffs, where peregrine falcons make their nests.”

In 1990, Mr. Gilmour opened the Wakaya Club & Spa, a cluster of eight free-standing suites on a former coconut plantation. At the time, he said, he opened it as “really just a place where my friends, those I can’t put up in my own home, can come and share the peace.” He added: “I don’t see it as terribly commercial, frankly. It will probably only break even.”

It nonetheless became popular with celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Bill and Melinda Gates (who spent part of their honeymoon there) and Keith Richards, who fell out of a palm tree there in 2006 and was flown to a hospital in New Zealand with a head injury.

One day in the 1990s, Mr. Gilmour saw guests at the property drinking Evian water.

“He said, ‘There’s something wrong with this picture,’ and I said, “What do you mean?’” Ms. Gilmour said. “And he said, ‘We’re on our own island, and they’re drinking water from Lake Geneva. I know that with Fiji’s rainfall, there must be a greater water source.’”

Mr. Gilmour learned of an underground aquifer beneath the volcanic highlands of the Fijian island of Viti Levu, with water rich in the mineral silica. In 1996, his company began packaging and shipping its distinctive square bottles around the world.

Mr. Gilmour said the water’s purity was the result of Fiji’s geographic remoteness. “There’s no acid rain, no industrial pollution, no pesticides,” he told The Palm Beach Post of Florida in 1998. “It’s the purest virgin ecosystem.”

Fiji is now the second-largest imported water brand in the United States (after San Pellegrino), according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

David Harrison Gilmour was born on Nov. 5, 1931, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and grew up in Toronto. His father, Adam Gilmour, was an investment banker, and his mother, Doris Godson Gilmour, was an opera singer.

Mr. Gilmour studied business management for a year at the University of Toronto. He then accepted his father’s offer of a $10-a-day stipend to travel through Europe, which he did for a while before returning to Canada.

“I learned what people are really like,” he told Palm Beach Illustrated in 2015. “I learned to touch only what I totally believe in 100 percent. And I learned how to take care of myself.”

He turned down his father’s offer to join his bank and instead moved to Montreal, where he sold pots and pans door to door for a year.

His first business was importing modern, streamlined Scandinavian housewares and furnishings. He followed that in 1958 with the start-up Clairtone Sound, a collaboration with Peter Munk, a Hungarian-born electrical engineer. The company made critically acclaimed, sophisticated hi-fi systems whose buyers included Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner. But it foundered after branching into televisions and shifting operations, disastrously, to Nova Scotia.

Amid steep losses, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk were forced out of the company in 1968 and later settled a lawsuit claiming that they sold shares before the announcement of poor quarterly results in 1967.

They recovered quickly and in 1969 started Southern Pacific Properties, which accumulated more than 50 hotels in Australia and New Zealand as well as in Fiji, New Caledonia, Tahiti and other islands. An ambitious development that was to be built near the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, was eventually nixed by President Anwar Sadat in 1978.

Three years later, Tan Sri Khoo Teck Puat, a Singaporean banker, purchased Southern Pacific for a reported $130 million. But Wakaya remained separately owned by Mr. Gilmour and his partners, until Mr. Gilmour bought them out.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk were among the original partners in Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest gold producers. Mr. Munk was its longtime chairman and chief executive, and Mr. Gilmour was a board member until 2001. Mr. Munk died in 2018.

Mr. Gilmour described his working relationship with Mr. Munk in 2008 with The Globe and Mail of Toronto. “I am more the entrepreneurial type who likes challenges of starting up, and Peter loves growing a colossus,” he said. “Once it reaches a critical mass, I kind of get bored sitting around a boardroom table.”

Fiji Water, marketed as a luxury brand, was a major commercial success. But, like other brands, it drew scorn from environmentalists, who criticized the industry for the amount of energy it consumed and the greenhouse gases created in making and shipping plastic bottles, and for the plastic waste they leave behind. Fiji, in particular, was singled out for shipping water to consumers thousands of miles away.

Mr. Gilmour sold Fiji Water to Roll International in 2004, and Wakaya to Clare Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, in 2016, after a Category 5 cyclone devastated the island. “We sold it for 10 cents on the dollar,” Ms. Gilmour said. In 2020, Ms. Bronfman was sentenced to prison for her role in enabling the Nxivm sex cult.

Mr. Gilmour’s wife is his only immediate survivor. His marriages to Anna Wilmot, Erin’s mother, and to Diane Williams ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan and Palm Beach.

Mr. Gilmour, who sold his Palm Beach estate last year for $44.9 million, had one last company in his portfolio at his death: Wakaya Perfection, a wellness company that sells powders and capsules of ginger and turmeric grown in volcanic soil in Fiji and Nicaragua.

“David had this belief that organic, single-source, very pure, high-quality ginger and turmeric would be something that people wanted,” Mr. Roth, who started the company with Mr. Gilmour, said by phone. “And Oprah chose it twice as one of her favorite things.”

On a recent morning at the Louvre, Anya Firestone handed out bottles of Evian. “Because ‘the art of drinking’ begins with hydration,” she said.

Ms. Firestone, 34, a museum guide-conférencière (tour guide) and art integration strategist, wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of olive martinis, pink Manolo Blahniks, the Mini Bar clutch by Charlotte Olympia and a Marni dress printed with likenesses of Venus.

She escorted Matt Stanley, her client, and his Parisian date, Salomé Bes, 30, past the long lines at the museum’s entrance and toward the Code of Hammurabi. The set of ancient Babylonian laws included “an eye for an eye,” she explained, and it also dealt with issues of alcoholic beverages, like watered-down wine and the peoples’ “right to beer,” as she pithily put it.

“Pretty impressive!” said Mr. Stanley, the chief executive of a memory care community near Austin, Texas. Mr. Stanley, 43, had hired Ms. Firestone to design a two-day visit around alcohol.

“You’re going to see that drinking and art had the same upbringing and moved in the same direction — from a religious context with prayers and libations to decadence and debauchery,” said Ms. Firestone, who calls her custom tours “cou-tours,” a play on couture.

Last fall, Ms. Firestone starred in “The Real Girlfriends of Paris,” a reality show broadcast on Bravo that followed six 20- and 30-something American women as they navigated work, life and l’amour. She said that the opportunity to put her business, called Maison Firestone, on public view was the main reason she had done the show.

But Ms. Firestone had also liked the idea of elevating the oft-scorned TV genre with art and culture. (Not to mention some pun- and Yiddish-inflected wit.) “By the way,” she said, “I don’t describe myself as American. I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”

Ms. Firestone was raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood Manhattan; her parents were actors. She first moved to Paris in 2010 after college at George Washington University, for an artist residency, during which she wrote poetry and sculpted oversize macarons. (People thought they were colorful hamburgers,” she said, explaining that the confection had not become popular yet.)

She worked briefly as an au pair, channeling Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp, she said. But Ms. Firestone likened her current plot to the TV shows “Emily in Paris” — “Love her chutzpah, less her bucket hats,” she said of the protagonist — and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

After a master’s degree in French cultural studies from Columbia Global Center in Paris, she spent a few years traveling between New York and Paris, offering custom tours and writing about art and brand intersections for Highsnobiety. Maison Firestone — which also designs themed events with luxury brands — followed from that interest in “art as branding,” she said.

At “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” a white marble statue from Hellenistic Greece, better known as “Niké,” for example, Ms. Firestone noted that the figure’s wings had inspired the sportswear empire’s Swoosh logo.

Ms. Firestone’s clients used to find her only by word of mouth, but now about half of them, including Mr. Stanley, come to her via the Bravo show and Instagram. The majority are visiting France from the United States; the cost of a tour starts at $2,400 for one or two people for one day.

Her angle is to take “art off the wall to show its intersection with things that people already enjoy and consume,” Ms. Firestone said, be it champagne or Schiaparelli or N.F.T.s. Recent and upcoming tours have been designed for drag queens, the crypto team at a venture capital firm, “Eloise-like” little girls with a fondness for dinosaurs, and a man who is blind.

Working her way through Dionysian art and decorative works, Louis XIV’s stemware, and the occasional Bravo fan (“I just want to say that I loved the show!”), Ms. Firestone directed Mr. Stanley and Ms. Bes into the museum’s largest room, where the Mona Lisa hangs on a wall across from “The Wedding Feast at Cana,” an immense piece by the 16th-century artist Paolo Veronese that depicts Jesus Christ turning water into wine. “You can see wine tastings happening all over the painting,” she said.

After lunch at the Ritz, which naturally featured cocktails and champagne, the itinerary called for the Musée d’Orsay. “The Louvre was a former palace, this is a former train station,” Ms. Firestone said. She likes companion visits to the two museums, which, she said, help to show how art entered modernity by breaking from the monarchy, the church and the academy and spilling into the cafes of Paris.

“L’Absinthe” by Edgar Degas pictured what she called a “tapped out” woman with a glass of the infamous green spirit on a table before her. Nearby was a painting by Édouard Manet of the same woman (the actress Ellen Andrée), titled “Plum Brandy.” Ms. Firestone prompted her clients to ponder the difference. “She’s not nearly so sad or so schnockered here, right? She seems OK.”

Paris, she said, had by then been transformed by Napoleon III’s urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, bringing with it grand department stores like Le Bon Marché and Samaritaine.

Ms. Firestone and Mr. Stanley met the next day at Samaritaine, where she had arranged for a cognac tasting and some shopping in the private apartments with a stylist. “Bonjour. How y’all doin’?” Mr. Stanley said, greeting the staff. “I’m not an aristocrat — I’m just a cowboy!” He chose a pair of drawstring trousers by Maison Margiela.

Afterward, in a taxi, Ms. Firestone pointed at a Prada ad featuring Scarlett Johansson. “I think they’re referencing that Man Ray photo of Kiki de Montparnasse,” she said. “We like a good art-brand ref.” She Googled the Man Ray photograph on her phone and held it up for Mr. Stanley to see, who said he felt like he had gotten a master class.

“Who doesn’t love their hand held in Paris?” Ms. Firestone said.