Peter Lynch, the celebrated money manager famous for growing the Magellan mutual fund into a multibillion-dollar behemoth, is giving 27 paintings and three drawings — a collection worth more than $20 million — to Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art.
College officials said the donation, one of the largest in BC’s history, includes works by Pablo Picasso, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Albert Bierstadt, and comes with an additional $5 million grant to support what will be called the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection.
“This is a transformational gift,” said Nancy Netzer, the Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director of the McMullen Museum. “We’re a small museum, and these works have been in private hands for a long time. They haven’t been shown to the public, students haven’t worked on interpreting them, and, most importantly, scholars haven’t worked on interpreting them, except in a few cases.”
“They allow us to dig deeper,” Netzer said, “to uncover and excavate unknown meanings, and to tell, we hope, an expanded story of American history.”
A BC alumnus and longtime benefactor of the school, Lynch said he and his late wife, Carolyn, who died in 2015, began seriously collecting art three decades ago. He’s pleased this assemblage of work will remain intact and exhibited at the McMullen, which is free and open to the public.
“My hope is that this artwork will help students to develop a deeper understanding of art and its importance as a form of expression,” said Lynch in a statement. “All students definitely can learn from this collection, which includes a diversity of styles of painting, many of which depict the natural beauty of our country from its most celebrated painters.”
Notable pieces among the collection are Picasso’s pencil drawing “Head,” Homer’s oil painting “Grace Hoops,” a Cassatt watercolor “Mother and Child,” Sargent’s painting “Olive Trees, Corfu,” and Jack Butler Yeats’s 1929 painting, “Farewell to Mayo,” which British actor Sir Laurence Olivier had given to actress Vivien Leigh as a wedding present.
Calling it an “extraordinary compilation of artwork,” Theodore Stebbins Jr., the consultative curator of American art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum and former curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, said in a statement that Lynch’s gift includes several masterpieces that any museum would covet.
“Peter and Carolyn acquired wonderful seascapes and marine paintings, as well as remarkable non marines that include some of the masterpieces of the collection,” Stebbins said in the statement, citing, in particular, Martin Johnson Heade’s “Orchid and Hummingbirds Near a Mountain Lake,” which he called “an extraordinary painting, and the best Heade orchid artwork ever painted.”
In addition, Stebbins praised the William Bradford oil painting, “Among the Ice Floes.”
“It’s a stunning painting, representing Bradford at his absolute best,” Stebbins said. “Each painting is beautiful and tells a unique story of American life. It is an extraordinary collection for Boston College and for the community.”
Though he made his fortune as a money manager, Lynch, whose father taught mathematics and physics at BC, has a keen interest in art, fostered early on by regular outings to the Museum of Fine Arts with his mother. Specifically, he recalls pondering “Watson and the Shark,” a striking painting by John Singleton Copley that depicts the rescue of Brook Watson, a British teenager, from a shark attack.
“It’s breathtaking,” said Lynch, reached by phone Monday. “Watson became the lord mayor of London. [In the painting] you think he’s toast. It’s such a dramatic painting, so beautifully done. Every time I went back [to the MFA], my mother would take me to see it. It was definitely an inspiration.”
Lynch said he has great affection for the MFA and the Peabody Essex Museum, to which he and his late wife donated paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Childe Hassam.
The Lynches’ previous donations to BC include a gift of more than $10 million in 1999 to name the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch School of Education and Human Development, and a $20 million gift to establish The Lynch Leadership Academy, which trains and provides support for principals and aspiring principals from throughout Massachusetts.
“Boston College changed my life in a very positive way,” Lynch said Monday. “My wife and I have been very supportive because it’s an incredible institution.”
Here’s a look at more of the donated paintings:
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com.