Art collections can say as much about the collectors as about the artists. Serene landscapes may disclose a preference for repose over stimulation. A preponderance of small-scale works may signal a collector whose passion for art is larger than his means. And when the collector is an artist himself, his choices indicate not only his temperament and intellectual interests, but the technical problems with which he is most concerned.

An unusual exhibition opening next week at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College offers a chance to compare three different collections of works by the Hudson River School artists. One gallery will be devoted to works from the museum’s permanent collection that were amassed in the 19th century by a Scotch Baptist minister and founding trustee of the college. Another will be devoted to 11 paintings from a collection assembled since the 1980s by a Vassar alumna and her husband. A third gallery will display drawings collected by the artist Dan Flavin, with support from the Dia Art Foundation; these last are owned by Dia, but on long-term loan to the Lehman Loeb Art Center.

It may seem incongruous that Dia — which is best known for its array of works by major artists of the 1960s and ’70s, such as Flavin, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, and Donald Judd — even has 19th-century drawings in its collection. But as Dia’s curator, Lynne Cooke, explained, Dia’s founders, Philippa de Menil and Heiner Friedrich, were also interested in the collecting habits of the artists they patronized. At Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which he established with Dia’s support, he collected objects including Native American artifacts and sculptures by Chamberlain. Flavin, who lived for many years in Garrison, N. Y., was drawn to artists whom the local landscape had inspired, including John Kensett, Sanford Gifford, and Jasper Cropsey.

“He was interested in American culture, both high and low,” Ms. Cooke said, “and certainly the origins of the American visual culture tradition could be said to lie in the Hudson River School.”

Because Dia’s museum in Beacon — a cavernous former Nabisco factory — is not well-suited for displaying historical works, the foundation has put the drawings on loan to Vassar, where they complement the permanent collection. Since they are sensitive to light, the drawings spend most of their time in storage; the last time they were exhibited at the Lehman Loeb was in 2003.

It is largely thanks to the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, a Scottish Baptist minister from Albany, that Vassar has an art museum at all. Magoon, who was acquainted with many of the Hudson River School painters, built a large collection of what was then contemporary art in the 1850s and 1860s. When Vassar was being founded, he was horrified to learn that its leaders had hired a copyist to produce duplicates of Renaissance master paintings so that students could study technique from them.

“Magoon was so disgusted by the idea that we were not teaching from the original that he threatened to quit the board of trustees,” the director of the Lehman Loeb and the curator of the current exhibition, James Mundy, said. “Matthew Vassar made a pilgrimage to Albany to talk him back onto the board. At that time, he saw [Magoon’s] collection and committed to acquiring a collection like his.”

In the end, Vassar didn’t just acquire a collection like Magoon’s — he acquired that very collection, in 1864, for $20,000. It included around 300 paintings and over 3,000 works on paper.

Because Magoon was not a wealthy man, the paintings from his collection are of high quality, but considerably smaller than their counterparts by the same artists hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Mundy said. “We have his correspondence with artists, and it’s pretty hilarious,” he said. “He’s always writing to these painters and saying: ‘What will you give me for $7?'”

Alvin and Maryann Friedman saw an exhibition of Hudson River School paintings at Vassar in 1983; it so moved them that they decided to begin a collection themselves. They spent several years doing research — attending lectures, studying other collections, looking up exhibition catalogues — before starting to buy in 1986. Over the years, they have acquired 37 paintings, including ones by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Cropsey, Gifford, and others.

Mr. Mundy observed that there is almost a therapeutic side to the Friedmans’ collecting choices. As they write in an essay for the catalogue; “All our paintings have common features: limpid, quiescent views of serene waters, distant mountains, appealing foliage. Nothing is seen that appears turbulent or jarring. The images invite the viewer to enter the works and experience quietude, relaxation, and repose.”

Mrs. Friedman said that she and her husband were lucky to begin collecting when they did, because the rising values of Hudson River School painters would put some works they bought early out of their price range now. A painting by Church recently sold at Sotheby’s for almost $500,000, she said. She and her husband purchased a comparable painting in the late 1980s for about a tenth of that.

For the Friedmans, one nice aspect of the current exhibition has been a chance to connect with the curator, Ella Foshay, who put together the 1983 exhibition that so inspired them. Ms. Foshay, who went on to be the curator of the New-York Historical Society, is on the board of the National Portrait Gallery and has visited the Friedmans in Washington. She will give a talk on September 7 at the Lehman Loeb Art Center, “The Collectors’ Palette: American Landscape Paintings from the collection of Al and Maryann Friedman.”