Showing both a keen eye and willingness to take risks from the start, in 1925 Dale purchased his first avant-garde work, “The Plumed Hat,†1919, by Henri Matisse. Although considered then an outsider by most American collectors, this giant of Modernism became one of the collector’s favorites, and Dale acquired ten of his works.

American art history is filled with examples of museums that were founded by or transformed by the beneficence of a single family or patron. A case in point is the National Gallery of Art, which became a leading repository of French art with the donation of the remarkable Chester Dale collection in 1962.

Dale (1883‱962), who made a fortune as an astute and aggressive Wall Street bond dealer, channeled his energy and talent into acquiring great works of art. With the encouragement and discerning guidance of his wife Maud (1876‱953), a trained artist and critic, they acquired a magnificent trove of late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century French paintings, along with selected American works, which were bequeathed to the National Gallery.

“From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection,” on view at the National Gallery of Art through July 31, assembles more than 80 of the 300 works given by the Dales. “It is impossible to overestimate the transformative effect of the [Dale] collection&n the National Gallery,” says gallery director Earl A. Powell III. Organized by Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator in the National Gallery’s department of French paintings, the exhibition offers confirmation of the Dales’ eye for masterpieces.

Born in New York City, son of a cultured English immigrant father and an American-born homemaker, Dale grew up in Manhattan and summered in Larchmont, N.Y. After compiling a so-so academic record at Peekskill Military Academy, he dropped out to work on Wall Street. Starting as a messenger, Dale learned the investment and bond business, and by the age of 20 had established his own securities trading company. Excelling at financial gamesmanship, he became an expert in railroad bonds and a far-sighted champion of utilities investments, piling up a sizable fortune over the years.

One of Mary Cassatt’s strongest and most admired paintings, “The Boating Party,†1893‱894, was purchased by Dale in 1929.

In 1911, he married Maud Murray Thompson, a divorcee born in Rochester, N.Y., who had studied at the Art Students League and in Paris. Living at first on Manhattan’s East 19th Street, in a building also occupied by painter Cecilia Beaux, with George Bellows and Robert Reid residing nearby, they became active in New York society.

After becoming a member of the New York Stock Exchange in 1918, Dale made his first art buy, four paintings by J. Carroll Beckwith, followed by commissioned portraits of Maud by Reid and of himself by Bellows. They soon acquired the first of 22 works by Guy Pene du Bois and William Merritt Chase’s “Friendly Call.”

Building on annual visits to Paris, around 1925, Maud began to steer Dale toward French art, igniting a passion for works from the time of the Revolution to the present. Purchasing art on Parisian excursions until World War II and at auctions in New York, Dale often remarked, “She had the knowledge, I had the acquisitiveness.”

Dale made his first foray into Modernism with Henri Matisse’s “Plumed Hat,” acquired in 1926 for more than $2,000. Thereafter, he bought French art of the prior century and a half, along with works by earlier artists, called “ancestors.” In peak years, between 1926 and 1934, Dale acquired scores of Impressionist and Modernist paintings annually. While other collectors pulled out of the art market in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929, Dale forged ahead, purchasing approximately 100 works in 1930 alone. Moving audaciously, he was “a collector who approached the art market with the same daring and tenacity that he applied so successfully to the stock market,” observes Jones.

For many, the high point of the Dale collection may well be Pablo Picasso’s famous “Family of Saltimbanques,†1905, the masterwork of the artist’s Rose Period. In a typically audacious move, Dale bought the canvas, measuring 94 5/8 by 100 7/8 inches, sight unseen. In it, the harlequin is Picasso; the hefty jester is poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the seated woman the artist’s mistress, Fernande Olivier.

The pace of Dale’s collecting slowed in the 1940s and 1950s, but his passion for art continued unabated. “Today, I buy only when I find a picture that I feel will improve the collection,” he said. Purchases of several Bellows masterpieces and paintings by Eugene Boudin, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh reflected his ongoing discernment and ambition. He also developed friendships with such contemporary artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Salvador Dali, whose “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” was acquired in 1956 and displayed with great fanfare at the National Gallery.

Starting with the gallery’s opening in 1941, Dale donated and loaned many works to the museum, and became active in its governance, serving as president of the board of trustees from 1955 to 1962. He was also involved in and loaned works to a number other leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, each of which hoped to obtain the priceless Dale collection on his death.

Maud died in 1953 and Chester, of a heart attack, in 1962.

Having outmaneuvered its competitors, the National Gallery was bequeathed the core of the fabulous Dale collection, comprising 223 paintings, seven sculptures and 23 works on paper. It is one of the most valuable gifts ever received by the museum. Subsequently, 17 works were donated by the Dale estate, bringing the total number in the Dale collection to 306. By stipulation, none may leave the gallery. Dale also bequeathed his personal library and money to support fellowships and acquire additional French art.

William Merritt Chase’s “A Friendly Call,†1895, enlivened with flickering brushwork, is one of a number he painted in his studios. It measures a sizable 30 1/8 by 48¼ inches.

The Dale collection is usually displayed chronologically and by artist throughout the museum. For this exhibition, however, works are organized thematically, providing a fresh look at the magnitude and scope of the Dales’ beneficence.

The first gallery highlights important works by some of the Dales’ favorite artists. Standouts include Auguste Renoir’s charming “A Girl with a Watering Can,” the gallery’s most popular work, and “Madame Sicot” in her shimmering blue-purple dress; van Gogh’s poignant “Woman in a White” and Modigliani’s appealing “Gypsy Woman with Baby.” Elsewhere in this awe-inspiring room are portraits of women by Mary Cassatt, Degas, Picasso and Renoir, and female nudes and studies by Cassatt, Gustave Courbet, Matisse and Renoir. There are portraits of men by Paul Cezanne, Degas, Picasso and Edouard Vuillard.

At a time when Italian Modernist Amedeo Modigliani’s work was relatively unknown, Dale acquired this now-iconic portrait, “Gypsy Woman with Baby,†1919. The collection, which eventually included 21 works by the artist, “was quickly recognized,†says curator Jones, “as perhaps the finest selection of Modigliani’s art in existence. 

There are knockout works, as well, in the gallery devoted to landscapes and cityscapes. Highlights include two of Claude Monet’s celebrated series of views of “Rouen Cathedral,” a beach scene by Boudin featuring a crowd of well-dressed folks and Camille Pissarro’s splendid evocation of Paris, “Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight.” More than holding their own are works by two American stalwarts, George Bellows’s gritty views of Manhattan, “Blue Morning” and “The Lone Tenement,” and Robert Henri’s graphic and evocative “Snow In New York.”

Nowhere is the Dales’ astute eye for quality better documented than in the gallery with still lifes. It offers as dazzling a display of this genre as you will ever see by Georges Braque, Henri Fantin-Latour, Matisse, Monet and, possibly most striking, a quintessential canvas by Cezanne, “The Peppermint Bottle.”

The gallery showcasing works of “monumental modernity” features Edouard Manet’s “The Old Musician,” already considered a world-class work when Dale purchased it in 1930 for the princely sum of $250,000, and Picasso’s iconic “Family of Saltimbanques,” bought less than a year later for a bargain $20,000. Each measuring about 6 by 9 feet, they make a memorable pair.

Elsewhere in this room are a familiar Paul Gauguin evocation of Tahiti, “Fatata te Miti (By the Sea),” Toulouse-Lautrec’s glimpse of the Parisian demimonde, “A Corner of the Moulin de la Galette,” and van Gogh’s soulful female portrait, “La Mousme.”

The exhibition concludes, appropriately, with four portraits of the collectors themselves by widely different artists. Diego Rivera painted Chester Dale in 1945 seated at his desk looking like a dapper, pensive art scholar, while Salvador Dali’s likeness of 1958 suggests a satisfied patron seated on an airy perch with his arm around a black poodle. Maud Dale comes across in Bellows’s 1919 likeness as a handsome lady dressed to the nines, including long white gloves; 16 years later, Fernand Leger presented her as a monumental, far-seeing woman of formidable presence.

Chester Dale and Salvador Dali at the special preview of Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Last Supper,†1955. It measures an immense 65 5/8 by 10 51/8 inches. Dale made his daring purchase in 1956; the painting has been a crowd-pleaser ever since.

The Dales generosity nearly tripled the gallery’s permanent holdings of Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century paintings, setting it on the road to becoming a world-class institution. “It’s not just the backbone,” former gallery director John Walker said, but “the whole rib structure of the modern French school here.”

Employing diligence, study, astute knowledge, assertive tactics and lots of money, Maud and Chester Dale assembled a magnificent trove of masterpieces. In donating the bulk to the nascent National Gallery of Art, they continued a proud tradition of American philanthropy †and established for themselves a special place in the history of American art.

The 164-page exhibition catalog with excellent essays by curator Jones and Maygene Daniels, chief of Gallery Archives at the National Gallery, is published by the National Gallery. It sells for $50 hardcover.

The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, 202-737-4215 or www.nga.gov .