NEW YORK, NY.- Beginning this November, Sotheby’s will offer some 50 works from the exceptional collection of Richard (“Dick”) and the late Elizabeth (“Betty”) Hedreen. Devoted philanthropists, active supporters of their native Seattle and Washington State, and passionate collectors for six decades, the Hedreens can rightly be considered pioneers, who were among the very first to place considerable emphasis on the visual and intellectual dialogues inherent in juxtaposing art from across the ages, assembling a collection that spans the 15th century to the present day.
Highlights to be offered at Sotheby’s include major paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Cecily Brown and more, together with a moving Mater Dolorosa by Titian, a striking Northern Renaissance portrait by Georg Pencz, a Baroque masterpiece by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, and other Old Master Paintings by Gaetano Gandolfi and more.
These will be offered alongside a broad range of other works in a variety of media, across various Evening and Day sales this November, followed by a dedicated Old Masters auction in New York, February 2027. New York sales highlights will travel to London, Hong Kong, and Paris before pre-sale exhibition in New York. Highlights from the Master Paintings from the Hedreen Collection dedicated auction will travel to London this December before returning to New York for pre-sale exhibition.
The Hedreens are renowned as devoted philanthropists, supporting numerous initiatives in their native Seattle and Washington State, especially in the arts, ranging from ACT Theatre to the University of Washington press. The Seattle Art Museum and Seattle University have been central to the couple’s giving: Betty served for many years on the museum’s board, and together they chaired the campaign that enabled the construction of the Lee Center for the Arts.
Following Betty’s passing in 2022, Dick pledged the couple’s art collection to Betty’s alma mater, Seattle University, alongside an additional $25 million in seed funding to establish the Seattle University Museum of Art. While a group of works will now be sold at Sotheby's, the selection was made in close consultation with the university in order to ensure that the 350 or so works destined to form the museum’s foundational holdings remain of outstanding importance and caliber as well as broad-ranging geographically, culturally, and chronologically. The university’s collection will include numerous masterpieces: from Lorenzo Monaco’s canonical depiction of Madonna and Child, and portraits by Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo, lisabeth Vige Le Brun and Thomas Gainsborough, to defining works of Postwar and Contemporary American art by artists including Willem de Kooning, Rashid Johnson, and Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown and Jonas Wood.
DICK AND BETTY HEDREEN
Dick Hedreen’s interest in art began during his childhood in Seattle. On Saturday mornings, his parents would drop him and his brother off at the Seattle Art Museum, which screened films on the weekends. Afterwards, Dick would linger, wandering the museum's galleries and exploring the art and objects on display. What began as a chance habit sparked by curiosity became a lifelong one, shared intensely with Elizabeth “Betty” Ann Petri, whom Dick married in 1957.
Dick’s career as a property developer would go on to reshape the Seattle skyline, building towers such as the Hilton, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency hotels. With this early impact on the region, he and Betty never lost sight of the city that had formed them.
The couple would develop their shared interest in art together with Charlie Cowles, a curator at the Seattle Art Museum who brought them into Seattle’s Contemporary Art Council in the 1970s. As their travels took them around the world from visits to their local Seattle museums to the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence, their fascination with Old Masters grew to match their long-held interest in Contemporary art.
Despite these works lying centuries and worlds apart, Betty and Dick pursued their passion for the skill of the artist, and the arresting potential of visually powerful compositions. What began as a young couple collecting to furnish their first home grew into one of the great American collections, spanning from the 15th century to the present day, assembled solely by instinct and by heart.
That sense of custodianship found its fullest expression in the institutions that were central to their lives, including Seattle University, Betty's alma mater, as well as the Seattle Art Museum. 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.
AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS
Roy Lichtenstein, Reflections on “Painter and Model”
Estimate $20-30 million
Throughout his career, Roy Lichtenstein reinterpreted scenes from the art historical canon through his distinctive lens. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Lichtenstein began his Reflections series, superimposing reflection streaks which partially obscure the underlying scene to draw attention to the act of looking into the work’s subject.
Pablo Picasso was one of Lichtenstein’s greatest influences, emerging in his work as early as the 1960s. Created in 1990, Lichtenstein’s Reflections on “Painter and Model” boldly reimagines Picasso’s Painter and Model Cubist scene from 1928—which is held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York—uniting his own most iconic artistic motifs including his signature Ben-Day dots, bold graphic contours and vibrant palette.
The work was included in Lichtenstein’s landmark retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1993, and has been held in the Hedreen Collection for over three decades. Its appearance at auction coincides with Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the major retrospective devoted to the Pop art icon opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this October.
Georg Pencz, Portrait of Sigismund Baldinger
Estimate $8-12 million
A masterpiece of sixteenth-century German portraiture, Portrait of Sigismund Baldinger was painted at the height of Pencz's career. The portrait exemplifies the sophisticated Northern European portrait tradition that defined his work, combining remarkable psychological presence with naturalism, refinement and technical precision. Closely associated with Albrecht Drer and the Nuremberg Renaissance, Pencz was among the most accomplished artists of his generation, and this portrait of the prominent Nuremberg merchant Sigismund Baldinger stands as one of the defining achievements of his career.
Distinguished by an extraordinary provenance, the work remained with Baldinger's descendants for more than 370 years and was not exhibited publicly until 1966. Formerly part of the celebrated Herzog Collection, one of the most important collections assembled in Hungary in the early twentieth century, it was looted during World War II and returned by the Federal Republic of Germany to the heirs of Baron Andrs Herzog in 2010 following a significant restitution process.
A rare example of Pencz's great late panel portraits that remains in private hands, when offered in London in July 2010, the painting sold for 5.6 million ($8.5 million), establishing a new world auction record for the artist and underscoring the work’s status as one of the most important German Renaissance portraits ever to come to market.
Comparable examples are held in major museum collections including the Uffizi Galleries, Florence; the Royal Collection in London; and the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe.
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, The Sacrifice of Isaac
Estimate $7-10 million
A masterpiece of early Caravaggesque naturalism, The Sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most important paintings by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi ever to appear at auction. Painted circa 1617, probably in Spain, at the height of Cavarozzi’s powers and during the crucial period in which Caravaggio’s revolutionary style was transforming European painting, the work was rediscovered in 1987. Its extraordinary quality led scholars to associate it initially with Caravaggio himself, as a long-lost work by the artist, but its exceptional historical importance has since had the power to reshape perceptions of Cavarozzi, demonstrating that he was not simply a follower of Caravaggio but a seminal figure in the development of Caravaggesque painting in the early seventeenth century.
The painting is remarkably well preserved, allowing the sophistication of Cavarozzi’s technique to remain fully legible, from the dramatic chiaroscuro and sculptural modelling of the figures to the striking foreshortening and handling of light. Widely regarded as a defining achievement of Cavarozzi’s career, it represents the fullest expression of his artistic ambitions and stands among the most accomplished works produced within the early Caravaggesque movement. When the painting was offered at auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2014, it sold for 3.7 million ($6.3 million), setting a new world auction record for the artist.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (Shipwreck)
Estimate $7-10 million
Cecily Brown’s Untitled (Shipwreck) is a quintessential encapsulation of the synergies between Old Master paintings and Contemporary art that define the Hedreen Collection. The painting belongs to an important series of works that Brown created between 2016-18 exploring 19th century Romantic landscape painting, namely Eugne Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan and Thodore Gricault’s The Raft of Medusa. Spanning more than 12 feet, Brown's versatility in painting is on monumental display, evoking the opulence and grandeur of the Old Masters in tandem with the ethereality of the Impressionists and the dynamism of the Abstract Expressionists.
Gaetano Gandolfi, The Birth of Venus
Estimate $2-3 million
This painting and its pendant, which are both considered to be amongst Gandolfi’s greatest masterpieces, were most probably commissioned from the artist by Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov in the late 1780s. The paintings were eventually separated and kept in private collections for over a century, but gained attention with scholars in 1977 when two highly finished oil sketches of the compositions emerged. These sketches connected scholars to the possible existence of these larger paintings, whose commission was described by Gandolfi's son Mauro Gandolfi in a letter dated 1819.
This work was rediscovered in a Brussels collection and unveiled to the public for the first time in 2002. Its pendant, Diana and Callisto, was more recently discovered in 2009 and is now in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA.
Titian, The Mater Dolorosa
Estimate $4-6 million
More than any of the great Italian Renaissance painters who preceded him, Titian created images of the Virgin Mary of extraordinary emotional impact. The Hedreen Collection includes a powerful yet deeply touching depiction of the Mater Dolorosa, capturing the moment when Mary mourns her son, fully understanding the physical sacrifice he is about to make. For Titian’s Counter-Reformation audience, this was a particularly potent subject, and he likely painted this work for Gonzalo Prez, secretary to King Philip II of Spain, himself one of Titian’s most important patrons. It was originally paired with a now lost pendant of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, forming a kind of diptych intended for private contemplation.
Signed by Titian and painted on panel, this Mater Dolorosa introduces vibrant Venetian color to what had previously been a traditional Northern European theme, creating a new type of devotional painting. Titian’s singular technique and palette—his deep reds and soft, layered brushwork—heighten the emotional intensity of the Virgin’s grief. The panel was rediscovered only two decades ago and clearly relates to other similar paintings by Titian, including two in the Prado. Technical imaging of the panel reveals that its original conception closely corresponds to one of these paintings, which Titian painted for King Philip in 1554. That painting shows the Virgin’s head raised, rather than lowered in sorrow. Titian appears to have made this and other changes with the knowledge that Gonzalo Prez would have known the King’s own version, thus allowing us to more fully understand the great master’s working method.
