J annine and Robert MacDonnell lived a life where beauty was both a value and a practice cultivated in their family, in the landscape of Round Pond, and in the works of art they chose to live with every day. Known for their discerning eye and extraordinary sense of stewardship, Jannine and Robert assembled an expansive collection of American Modernism, Post-War, and Contemporary art that reflects a passion for works across media, movements, and generations. Their collection stands as a testament to their shared vision: a life lived with art at its center and with a generosity of spirit that continues to resonate today.

In 1978, Jannine and Robert purchased land in Napa Valley, and over time they developed Round Pond Estate into a place that reflected their shared values: craft, community, and the joy of gathering. It became an extension of family life, a landscape shaped by their vision and care, and a legacy that continues to honor them both. That same sensibility—thoughtful, expansive and deeply alive—defined their collecting. The works they chose were inspiring and deeply personal, reflecting the conversations, values, and beauty that defined their lives together.

What makes the collection truly singular is not only what they acquired, but how they lived with each work of art. Their residences—both in San Francisco and at Round Pond—became spaces of conversation, where artworks were presented with extraordinary care. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture were placed in relationship with one another, creating dialogues across rooms and generations: modernism beside contemporary, gesture beside precision, the intimacy of works on paper beside bold sculptural forms.

Led by Charles Sheeler’s Windows, the collection is anchored by a work of exceptional importance in the history of American modernism. Among the most significant Sheeler paintings to appear at auction, Windows embodies the artist’s singular synthesis of classical compositional order and modern machine-age aesthetics, reducing the vertical drama of New York into a poised architecture of intersecting planes, sharp angles, and immaculate stillness. In Sheeler’s hands, the modern city becomes not a site of chaos, but one of control and contemplation: a vision in which the skyscraper is transformed into pure structure, at once dreamlike and exacting. The painting belongs to the artist’s mature return to the urban and industrial subjects that defined his career, and stands as a particularly refined statement of Precisionism’s broader ambition to reconcile modern life with clarity, balance, and form.

As a founding force within Precisionism, Sheeler helped articulate one of the first truly indigenous modes of American modern art, translating the visual language of industry, photography, and architecture into a new, distinctly national form of abstraction. That achievement gives Windows a particular resonance within the MacDonnells’ collection. It is not only a masterwork in its own right, but a touchstone for many of the broader ideas the collection as a whole sustains: discipline and lyricism, surface and structure, human feeling held in tension with formal restraint. With its cool authority and distilled geometry, Windows asserts the collection’s highest ambitions from the outset.

That same pursuit of distilled form and intellectual grace finds a powerful counterpart in Isamu Noguchi’s Shodo Flowing, a work that brings a different, though no less profound, register to the collection. Among the most eloquent expressions of Noguchi’s lifelong dialogue between the philosophical tenets of Zen Buddhism and the formal language of European modernism, the sculpture was conceived from a unique balsa-wood model and cast in bronze. In Shodo Flowing, Noguchi translates the fluidity of Japanese calligraphy into sculptural form, giving three-dimensional body to the continuous, meditative movement of shodō. At once sinuous and structural, monumental and intimate, it reveals the artist at his most poised, animating space with a grace that feels both ancient and utterly modern.

Further enriched by works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion, Roy Lichtenstein, Elaine de Kooning, Mark Tobey, and Philip Guston, the collection reflects a way of seeing never confined to a single movement or school, but alive to the full breadth of modern and post-war art. Across these artists runs a shared spirit of reinvention: Hepworth’s serene command of mass and void, Hélion’s movement between abstraction and figuration, Tobey’s charged and calligraphic line, Elaine de Kooning’s restless vitality, Lichtenstein’s cool graphic precision, and Guston’s deeply personal reimagining of painterly form. Together, they suggest a collection shaped less by category than by instinct, intelligence, and a deeply personal response to visual force.

That breadth was central to how Jannine and Robert MacDonnell collected. They were drawn to works that could hold their own distinct presence while also entering into conversation with one another—works that revealed unexpected affinities across generations, mediums, and art-historical positions. In their homes, modernism stood beside post-war experimentation, sculptural clarity beside painterly freedom, creating a visual world that was both rigorous and alive. The collection thus reflects not only the depth of their knowledge, but the generosity of their imagination: a way of living with art that was thoughtful, expansive, and deeply attuned to beauty in its many forms.

This collection is a true embodiment of Jannine and Robert MacDonnell's vision: the extraordinary world they built together—where art was at its very center. It is Sotheby’s distinct privilege to share their story with collectors around the world as these works of art find their way to the next generation of collectors.