Sotheby’s to Offer $90 M. in Art from Richard Hedreen’s Collection, Ahead of Major University Gift

Sotheby’s will offer some 50 works from the collection of Seattle real estate developer Richard “Dick” Hedreen this fall and winter, in a series of sales expected to bring at least $90 million.

The sale comes two years after Hedreen pledged his and his late wife Betty’s collection to Seattle University, along with $25 million in seed money to establish a new art museum there. Rather than a reversal of that gift, the family says the sale is intended to help make it happen.

Around 350 works are earmarked for the university, including paintings by Willem de Kooning, Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown, and Jonas Wood, as well as Old Masters works by Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Thomas Gainsborough.

Choosing the 50 works to sell was not simply a matter of carving off a portion of the collection. According to a source familiar with the process, Hedreen and members of his family spent hours with an art historian from Seattle University, going through the collection piece by piece to determine what was important for the university to have and what could go to auction. The university wound up getting the vast majority of the works on its wish list, the source said.

The collection is stand out; the Hedreens were keen on mixing contemporary art with Old Masters, often hanging works made centuries apart alongside one another. The couple began collecting in Seattle and became involved with the Seattle Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Council in the 1970s. Their interest in Old Masters developed later, eventually producing a collection stretching from the 15th century to the present.

Leading the Sotheby’s group is Roy Lichtenstein’s Reflections on “Painter and Model” (1990), estimated at $20 million to $30 million. The painting, which the Hedreens have owned for more than three decades, riffs on Picasso’s 1928 Painter and Model at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its trip to the auction block comes shortly after the opening of “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Another major contemporary work included in the sale is Cecily Brown’s 12-foot-wide Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017, estimated at $7 million to $10 million. The painting comes from a series Brown made between 2016 and 2018 looking at 19th-century Romantic painting, particularly Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840) and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19).

The Old Masters will get their own sale at Sotheby’s New York location in February. Among them is Georg Pencz’s 16th-century Portrait of Sigismund Baldinger, estimated at $8 million to $12 million. The painting remained with Baldinger’s descendants for more than 370 years before later entering the Herzog Collection. It was looted during World War II and returned to the heirs of Baron András Herzog by Germany in 2010. That same year it sold at auction for £5.6 million, then about $8.5 million, setting a record for Pencz.

Also coming in February is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (ca. 1617), estimated at $7 million to $10 million. Rediscovered in 1987, the painting was initially associated with Caravaggio himself before scholars settled on Cavarozzi. It last sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for £3.7 million ($6.3 million), then a record for the artist.

Titian’s The Mater Dolorosa (ca. 1550–55), estimated at $4 million to $6 million, and Gaetano Gandolfi’s The Birth of Venus (1770), estimated at $2 million to $3 million, round out the major Old Master offerings.

The sale puts a considerable price tag on only a fraction of what Hedreen originally promised Seattle University. When the gift was announced in 2024, the collection was widely valued around $300 million. But that was for a collection of around 200 works. The 50 works Sotheby’s is selling now represent roughly one-eighth of the collection by number, while the remaining 350 works are intended to become the foundation of the university’s new museum.

“Seattle University has long held a special place in our lives, and our commitment to it remains as strong as ever,” the Hedreen family said. The works being sold, they added, were chosen with the university so that what remains still contains the “landmark works, historical depth and variety of artistic voices” envisioned for the museum.