Seeger's maternal grandfather was William J. Buchanan, founder and owner of multiple privately held lumber companies in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, including Bodcaw Enterprises.
From his yearbook page: “Joe is quite frank in telling us that he is an artist and musician, and we expect any day to hear that he has taken off for the Latin Quarter....
He maintained an interest in Greece, however, eventually funding what became the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at his alma mater, Princeton.
[2] According to a 2021 Art News article, Seeger's year in Florence led to an interest in such modern artists as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, and he began collecting in earnest upon his return to New York in about 1950.
Often buying anonymously at Sotheby's or through individual dealers, Seeger's collection went on to include works by such artists as Max Beckmann, Joseph Glasco,[6] Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Barbara Hepworth, J. M. W. Turner, Paul Gauguin, Egon Schiele, and many others.
[7] In 1980, the year after Seeger and Cone met, they moved to England and made their largest and most public acquisition: Sutton Place, the Grade I listed Tudor manor house in Surrey.
[2][5] Seeger and Cone used the large space to house their collections and to offer concerts and exhibitions through their Sutton Place Heritage Trust.
As Cone told the Financial Times a few years after Seeger's death: “What Stanley was doing in his collecting life was creating episodes, like little nests.
[11] In 1993 Seeger sold his entire collection of 88 artworks by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso at Sotheby's in New York, raising over $32m.
[5] Seeger had told him that he no longer wanted the collection, feeling that once they had acquired a painting from Picasso's Rose Period it would be complete.
Seeger sold the Bacon triptych that had hung in Sutton Place for $8.6 million in 2001; at the time, it was the highest price paid for a work by that artist.
[5] In 2018, Sotheby's organized another auction, “A Private View: Property from the Country Home of Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger.”[12] The architect and designer Sir Hugh Casson said of Seeger that he regarded "the chic as a badge of insecurity and the conventional as a signal of surrender".