Stanley J. Seeger

Stanley Joseph Seeger Jr. (28 May 1930 – 24 June 2011) was an American-born art collector. Seeger lived in Great Britain for the last three decades of his life.

Early life Seeger was born to Helen Buchanan Seeger and Dr. Stanley J. Seeger in Milwaukee. His parents met in the 1920s when his mother brought her own ailing mother to the Mayo Clinic, where Dr. Seeger was a surgeon. The couple then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Seeger and his sister, Hannah, were born.

Seeger's maternal grandfather was William J. Buchanan, founder and owner of multiple privately held lumber companies in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, including Bodcaw Enterprises. Buchanan died in 1923, and his only son, Will Buchanan—-a bachelor without children—-ran the companies until his death in 1940. In 1941, Seeger's family moved to Texarkana, Texas so that his father could run the various Buchanan companies.

Between 1902 and 1935, Buchanan companies shipped almost 7 billion feet of yellow pine lumber from their land and lumber mills, one of which was the largest mill in the world. The family's large land holdings led to significant oil interests; for example, one deal in about 1940 led the family to lease the oil rights to 350,000 acres of their land to H.L. Hunt. Apparently, the lease was signed as Seeger's uncle was hospitalized on his deathbed; Hunt slept in the adjacent hospital to get the deal signed. The need to move the lumber led to a financial interest in what became the Kansas City Southern Railway. With the death of his uncle, ownership of these companies was funneled towards the Seeger family.

Like their only son, Seeger's parents were collectors. His father collected books, and his mother collected antiques.

Seeger spent his senior year (1946–47) as a boarding student at Dallas’ Texas Country Day School, a forerunner of St. Mark's School of Texas. From his yearbook page: “Joe is quite frank in telling us that he is an artist and musician, and we expect any day to hear that he has taken off for the Latin Quarter.... Always true to his home country, the North, Joe tells us that he still dislikes Texas as much as he did when he first arrived. If Princeton is far enough north, he should be very happy there.”

At Princeton, Seeger studied architecture and music. While in college, he spent a year in Florence, Italy studying under composer Luigi Dallapiccola. Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Barbara Hepworth, J. M. W. Turner, Paul Gauguin, Egon Schiele, and many others.

In 1980, the year after Seeger and Cone met, they moved to England and made their largest and most public acquisition: Sutton Place, the Grade I listed Tudor manor house in Surrey. They bought the house from Paul Getty for £8 million, , the highest price ever paid for a British property.

Seeger and Cone used the large space to house their collections and to offer concerts and exhibitions through their Sutton Place Heritage Trust. Controversially, Seeger hung Francis Bacon's Triptych – Studies of the Human Body (1979), one of his 28 large triptychs in the Great Hall at Sutton Place. Bacon himself visited Sutton Place to see his painting there, and Cone said that Bacon appreciated its location there.

During the Sutton Place years, and through the rest of his life, Seeger continued to buy (and sell) freely. As Cone told the Financial Times a few years after Seeger's death: “What Stanley was doing in his collecting life was creating episodes, like little nests. It was his way of keeping the outside world at bay. He was a very private and very shy man.”

Selling Seeger and Cone had underestimated the media attention that the purchase of Sutton Place would garner, and Seeger sold the property six years later, in 1986, to Frederick R. Koch.

In 1993 Seeger sold his entire collection of 88 artworks by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso at Sotheby's in New York, raising over $32m.

The architect and designer Sir Hugh Casson said of Seeger that he regarded "the chic as a badge of insecurity and the conventional as a signal of surrender".