After attending Wake Forest University on an athletic scholarship, J. Donald Nichols played professional baseball with the Baltimore Orioles. From there he went into the real estate development business. He has built more than 175 shopping centers throughout the country, and his company, JDN Realty, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Nichols first began collecting American Impressionist paintings in the 1970s, buying one painting as his personal reward for each shopping center he built. After ten years, he began looking for a new area in which to collect. The J. Donald Nichols Collection is now recognized as perhaps the finest collection of American abstract art of the 1930s and 1940s ever assembled.