He did it all quietly. “Nothing about him said, ‘Look at me,’” said Candace Beinecke, president of Aso O. Tavitian’s foundation.

“Very few people outside the art world knew about him,” confided Olivier Meslay, the director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.

When it was announced last month that Aso O. Tavitian, through his foundation, had left the Clark 331 artworks estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars — plus $45 million to build a new wing to house it all — the news prompted some to wonder: So who was this guy?

Tavitian, who died in 2020 at age 80, was a self-made man and a focused, under-the-radar collector who built a staggering trove of old masters and other classical European artworks — by esteemed painters like Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, Parmigianino, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Gian Lorenzo Bernini — in just 16 years.

Mr. Pogorzelski confirmed his resignation in a text message on Sunday evening, saying he and seven other campaign staffers had resigned on “our own accord.”

The timeline of the deal allows Congress to sidestep a government shutdown during the campaign season, but it all but ensures that spending disputes will dominate the lame-duck period between the election and the inauguration of a new Congress in January.

Most of the objects that Tavitian collected that were not in the Clark gift — including fine English furnishings that resided in his grand houses, one in New York City and one in Stockbridge, Mass. — will be sold in a four-part auction at Sotheby’s New York in February, “The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian,” with an overall estimate of $14 million to $21 million.

It will finally give the public a window into his art-filled and very well-appointed life.

The collection had an aristocratic cast — Meslay called it “princely.” Some notable lots include a religious painting by the Renaissance master Ambrosius Benson (estimated at $600,000 to $800,000) and a Madonna and Children from around 1620 by the Italian old master Daniele Crespi ($300,000 to $500,000). But Tavitian, while a lover of fine wine, especially Burgundy, was not born to the manor.

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