The Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas has acquired an album of drawings, photographs and letters amassed by the sugar tycoon and art collector William Hood Stewart. Stewart was an avid collector of European art and the Modern Spanish School and his holdings include correspondence with artists such as Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Jéan-Léon Gerôme as well as with fellow collectors. The Meadows Museum acquired the album from New York’s Spanierman Gallery for an undisclosed amount.

The collection will be presented at the Meadows Museum in the exhibition The Stewart Album: Art, Letters and Souvenirs to an American Patron in Paris from August 25 through November 10, 2013. While Stewart had a sizable estate in his hometown of Philadelphia, he spent much of time in Paris, socializing with the artists he so admired. Stewart’s unique collection provides a glimpse into the careers, personal lives and artistic developments of a number of important European artists.

In 1898, Seven years after Stewart’s death, his collection was broken up at an auction and paintings were dispersed among the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a handful of other institutions. The Meadows Museum is planning to organize an exhibition that will reunite parts of Stewart’s collection that were separated over 100 years ago.