Peter Lynch has donated his art collection to Boston College, a gift of 30 works worth over $20 million together.
Lynch is the vice chairman of Fidelity Management and Research co, an investment company, where he was hired in 1966 because he caddied for the company’s golf-loving president. Now 77 years old, he’s worth an estimated $350 million (in 2006). He says that he regards philanthropy as an investment. His charitable foundation, the Lynch Foundation, has given away millions since its founding.
Lynch attended Boston College in the early ’60s, earning his BA. While he went on to post-grad studies at Wharton in Pennsylvania, he’s always maintained a sense of duty to his first alma mater. As an individual, he donated $10 million to the college in 2013, and the school named the Lynch School of Education and Human Development after him. According to Lynch, they’re also named in his will along with his children.
In the 1980s, Peter Lynch and his late wife began buying art, mostly American artists and impressionist landscapes. Of the thirty works he intends to give the school are included paintings by Jack Butler Yeats and Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso and Mary Cassatt.
The donation of 27 paintings and 3 drawings also comes with a $5 million donation for the upkeep and curation of the new collection at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. The collection will be called the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection.
“It’s a transformational gift,” said Nancy Netzer, director of the McMullen Museum. “These works have been in private hands, and now they’re moving to a big university with scholars from various disciplines who are very eager to research them. They tell a lot of stories that need to be uncovered from faculty not only in art and art history, but in sociology, theology and the earth and environmental sciences.”
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