Seattle College is planning for a brand new artwork museum, due to a present of a $300 million artwork assortment and $25 million in seed cash from a donor, the college trustees introduced on Wednesday.

The donation — by Richard Hedreen, an actual property developer — is the most important reward within the historical past of the college, a Jesuit establishment based in 1891, the trustees mentioned in an announcement.

Hedreen is donating his complete assortment, which has greater than 200 artworks relationship from the fifteenth century to as we speak, together with artwork by Thomas Gainsborough, Lucian Freud and Amy Sherald.

“It’s a outstanding instructing assortment,” the college’s president, Eduardo Peñalver, mentioned in a cellphone interview, including that “we sit up for having that on our campus and have our college, our college students have the ability to use that throughout your complete curriculum in sparking their very own studying and dialogue.”

Hedreen mentioned in an announcement that he was donating the gathering in honor of his spouse, Betty, who was a Seattle College alumna and served on the Seattle Artwork Museum board of trustees. She died in 2022.

“I’m assured {that a} Jesuit college, which focuses on instructing and the visible arts, poetry, literature, historical past, training is the appropriate place to have a museum that may educate artwork historical past,” Hedreen mentioned in a cellphone interview.

The brand new museum will likely be open to college students and the general public, Peñalver mentioned, including that it will be “a bridge between our campus and town.”

Edgar Gonzalez, the vp for college development, wrote in an e-mail that the college has already begun discussions with an architect associated to the deliberate museum and that the mission would take about three to 5 years to finish. “The seed funding will enable us to start transferring ahead with the mission instantly,” Gonzalez wrote.