When Leslie Ridley-Tree and her husband, Lord Paul Ridley-Tree, decided to donate their vast collection of 19th- and 20th-century paintings to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, they didn't set out to make it the largest in the museum's history, the Los Angeles Times reports.
"We wanted to make it available to as many people as we could," the couple's daughter, Leslie Ridley-Tree Fox, tells the Times.
"We wanted to make it available to as many people as possible who might not have had the opportunity to see it before."
The couple, who were active in the museum's fundraising efforts, donated 58 works to the museum over 25 years, the museum says in a press release.
They also helped fund major exhibitions, like "Eternal China: Splendors from the First Dynasties" in 1998 and "Masterpieces of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" in 2015, per the Times.
"We wanted to make sure that the museum was accessible to as many people as possible," Fox tells the Times.
"We wanted to make it available to as many people as possible who might not have had the opportunity to see it before."
The couple, who were born in London and moved to Santa Barbara in
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