When James Patton Jr. wasn’t building Patton Boggs, the firm he founded in 1962 that would become the highest-grossing lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., 50 years later, he was busy collecting art.
Patton was drawn into the art world by his wife, Mary, a watercolorist and textile designer who was involved with many art museums before she died in 2014. The couple of nearly 64 years created an extensive contemporary art collection, 100 pieces of which Patton recently donated to the North Carolina Museum of Art, a gift announced by the Raleigh-based nonprofit earlier this month.
