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

Nearly 50 pieces from the Seattle collector’s holdings, including a $30-million Roy Lichtenstein, are heading to the block to help fund a new home for hundreds more artworks promised to Seattle University.

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.

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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........

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