Collector Dick Hedreen Has Sold Artworks Before, But This Time the Proceeds Will Build a Museum

It’s no secret that the great generational transfer now underway is shoring up the auction business, making that segment of the art market healthier and more active than it might otherwise be. Newly flush inheritors are dipping their toes into the auction world, certainly, but there are also the collectors who, in planning for the future of their holdings and to legitimize letting go of valuable works of art, are selling at auction and directing the proceeds of sales not toward family foundations but toward philanthropic causes. Doing so creates a visible and lasting legacy, spares their heirs the complications of managing a collection and, in some cases, reduces estate-tax exposure.

In that vein, Sotheby’s recently secured nearly 50 works from the collection of Seattle real estate developer Richard “Dick” Hedreen, which will be offered as part of The New York Sales this November and in a dedicated Old Masters auction in New York in February 2027. Expected to generate a total exceeding $90 million, the sale of Hedreen’s holdings will support the construction of a new building for the Seattle University Museum of Art, as well as the museum’s development. The new building will house a major gift from Hedreen: 350 works, up from the more than 200 initially announced, which may be the largest donation of art ever made not only to a university in Washington state but to any university in the U.S.

Dick and his late wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Hedreen, built the collection over roughly six decades, and the gift—which Seattle University valued at more than $300 million—spans contemporary art and Old Masters works, with pieces by Willem de Kooning, Rashid Johnson and Amy Sherald alongside Bronzino, Jacopo da Pontormo and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

One of the highlights of the November sales will be Roy Lichtenstein’s Reflections on “Painter and Model” (1990), which will hit the block with a $20-30 million estimate shortly after the Whitney Museum opens “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” the artist’s first major survey in more than 30 years. Held in the Hedreen collection for more than three decades, the work draws inspiration from Picasso’s 1928 Painter and Model—the preparatory study was made directly on a MoMA postcard reproduction of Picasso’s painting—while extending Lichtenstein’s earlier experiments with mirrors into the more disruptive visual language of his Reflections works. Bands of simulated glare fragment and partially obscure the composition, turning it into an image of an image being viewed and, in effect, putting art history under glass. The work was last seen in Lichtenstein’s landmark retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1993.

Another top lot secured by Sotheby’s is Cecily Brown’s monumental 12-foot-wide canvas Untitled (Shipwreck) (2017), with an estimate of $7-10 million. Part of a body of work Brown made between 2016 and 2018, the painting explores the possibilities of a blue palette while drawing inspiration from dramatic Romantic maritime scenes, particularly Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840) and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). An entire section of Brown’s 2025 mid-career retrospective at the Barnes Foundation was dedicated to the artist’s ongoing dialogue with art history and her ability to draw on it to address the realities of the present. Speaking at the preview of that show, Brown drew parallels between those earlier scenes of shipwreck and suffering and the ongoing migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. “I don’t like being in my library tower making work about issues and other people’s suffering,” she commented, explaining how she was drawn to the possibility of engaging with past masterpieces as a means of reading the present and drawing out the sociopolitical implications embedded within them. “I realized this is kind of what art is for: the distancing that you get by looking at an older painting, even if it’s about a timeless subject and something that still exists, provides some comfort to make it acceptable. You can look at paintings of the most horrific things you’d never seen in real life.” Embracing the ambiguity of an image in continuous flux, Untitled (Shipwreck) invites confrontation with those layered meanings through Brown’s characteristically seductive application of paint.

Leading the dedicated Old Masters sale in February will be Georg Pencz’s 16th-century Portrait of Sigismund Baldinger, carrying a hefty estimate of $8-12 million that is supported in part by an exceptional provenance. An outstanding example of the sophisticated Northern European portrait tradition that defined his work, the painting remained with Baldinger’s descendants for more than 370 years before entering the Herzog Collection. A rare example of Pencz’s great late panel portraits to remain in private hands, the painting sold for £5.6 million ($8.5 million) when offered in London in July 2010, establishing a new world auction record for the artist and underscoring its status as one of the most important German Renaissance portraits ever to come to market.

Another highlight will be Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (ca. 1615-17), estimated to achieve $7-10 million. Rediscovered in the late 20th Century, the painting was initially associated with Caravaggio himself before scholars attributed it to Cavarozzi, one of the most accomplished painters to emerge from the Caravaggesque movement. Trained in Rome, Cavarozzi absorbed Caravaggio’s dramatic naturalism and contrasts of light and shadow before traveling to Spain around 1617, where his work helped transmit that visual language to a new generation of painters. Painted circa 1617, probably in Spain, at the height of Cavarozzi’s powers, The Sacrifice of Isaac last sold at Sotheby’s London in 2014 for £3.7 million, then a record for the artist. Also included in the group is Titian’s The Mater Dolorosa (ca. 1550-55), believed to be one of the first works in which the Venetian master introduced vibrant color to what had previously been a traditional Northern European theme, creating a new type of devotional painting. Rediscovered only two decades ago, the work relates to other similar paintings by Titian, including two in the Prado. Technical imaging of the panel revealed that its original conception closely corresponds to one of these paintings, which Titian painted for King Philip in 1554.

Also just announced as part of the February sale is Gaetano Gandolfi’s The Birth of Venus, which, together with its pendant, was most probably commissioned from the artist by Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov in the late 1780s and is considered among the artist’s greatest masterpieces. The two paintings were separated and remained in private collections for over a century, resurfacing in scholarly attention in 1977 when finished oil sketches of the compositions emerged, suggesting the existence of larger versions. Carrying a $2-3 million estimate, this work was rediscovered in a Brussels collection and unveiled to the public for the first time in 2002, while its pendant, Diana and Callisto, was discovered more recently, in 2009, and now belongs to the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA.

The Hedreens began collecting modestly in the 1960s, initially buying Pacific Northwest artists, including William Ivey and Guy Anderson, partly to furnish their home. A key turning point came in the mid-1970s, when they became acquainted with Charles Cowles, then a curator of contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum. Cowles introduced them to dealers in New York, London, Basel and Zurich and encouraged them to think internationally. “His idea was that you can buy better art by shopping in the world market than buying locally. He turned what was an interest into a passion,” Hedreen acknowledged in a statement when the major gift was announced in 2024. Since then, Hedreen has worked closely with Seattle University to determine which works would be included to best serve the institution and its educational mission. Once the selection was finalized, the remaining works could be directed elsewhere—including to auction, where the proceeds could help fund the infrastructure needed to house, preserve and display the collection.

“Betty and I always felt that we were custodians of the artworks we acquired, holding them in trust for a larger purpose,” Hedreen added, noting the Jesuits’ longstanding emphasis on the arts and humanities, including art history, and how that tradition has shaped Seattle University’s educational mission and its ties to the city’s arts community. “My goal is to keep the collection together in the new Seattle University Museum of Art, which will have a profound and lasting impact on students and faculty.”

Elizabeth Hedreen was an alumna of Seattle University, and the couple were longtime supporters of the university’s engagement with art and the city’s cultural ecosystem. Betty served as Vice Chair of the Seattle Art Museum board from 1994 to 1998 and chaired its governance committee. Together, she and Dick were among Seattle University’s foremost donors to the Chapel of Saint Ignatius for 25 years and chaired the campaign that enabled the construction of the Lee Center for the Arts, where the Hedreen Gallery was named in their honor.

What is particularly distinctive about the Hedreen collection is that it isn’t a trophy list assembled around a single market moment. Instead, it cuts across a broad arc of art history, placing Old Masters alongside Postwar American art and works by some of today’s most sought-after artists. Such category-fluid collecting has become increasingly fashionable but was far less common when the Hedreens began building their holdings. The result is an unusually museum-ready collection capable of illustrating the evolution of art across centuries, well suited to the educational mission of a university museum.

Speaking about the importance of art museums on university campuses, Hedreen noted that an on-campus museum “gives the university the tools to teach art history and visitors experience art and how the art speaks to them.” His hope at the time of the gift was that Seattle University would develop a collection capable of standing alongside those of major museums while becoming a destination for gallerygoers, collectors, students and the broader public interested in art.

This is not the first time Hedreen has sold major works. Over the decades, he and his wife would periodically let go of pieces, often using the proceeds to fund new acquisitions. Among the most significant was David Hockney’s Nichols Canyon (1980), which sold at Phillips in December 2020 for $41.1 million. The Hedreens also owned Francis Bacon’s 1976 triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait, which they acquired at Sotheby’s in November 2005 for about $5.1 million before selling it at Christie’s New York on May 13, 2008, for $28 million. Another Bacon from their collection, Pope with Owls (ca. 1958), was reportedly acquired by Hedreen from Thomas Ammann Fine Art in 1986 for roughly $700,000 and sold at Phillips on November 17, 2021, for $33 million. Provenance entries in several auction catalogs also trace major works by Willem de Kooning, Wayne Thiebaud, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Balthus through the Hedreen collection before those works passed, mostly through private transactions, to subsequent owners who later consigned them at auction.

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