Lillian Thomas Pratt formed her collection of Russian objets d'art between 1933 and 1946, bequeathing them to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts upon her death in 1947.

She had earlier made some excursions into collecting English and American furniture, 18th-century silver, laces, needlepoint, and modern silver, glass and jewelry.

"There must have been in her character an extreme sensitivity to craftsmanship, especially to precious materials cunningly wrought," wrote Parker Lesley, author of an early Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Pratt Collection catalog.

Both Mrs. Pratt and her husband, a millionaire executive of General Motors Corporation, believed intensely in an "obligation to use ... material riches to help enrich the lives of others," according to a Richmond newspaper editorial on John Lee Pratt's death in 1975.

A native of Philadelphia, Mrs. Pratt spent her early life in Tacoma, Wash., but moved back East when she married in 1918. She lived the last 15 years of her life at Chatham, a historic estate overlooking Fredericksburg. Pratt had bought the home in 1931, and he left it to the National Park Service when he died.

The Virginia Museum was not the sole institution to benefit from Mrs.
Pratt's generosity. She bequeathed $600,000 to the University of Virginia for children's orthopedics. She also left an equal sum to several individuals with the stipulation that, after their deaths, the remainder would go to a home for the aged in Tacoma or to the University of Virginia if the home should cease to exist.

John Lee Pratt was born on a farm in King George County in 1879. The son of a confederate solider, he graduated from the University of Virginia as a civil engineer and joined the Du Pont Company in 1905. In 1919 he went to work for the fledgling General Motors Company, where he rose to a vice presidency and was named a director. He retired in 1939.

Mr. Pratt was also a strong supporter of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In 1940, he gave the museum $10,000 to establish the museum's Fellowship program. In 1963, he established the Resident Craftsman program to raise the standards of craft production in Virginia. In 1971, he was the then-anonymous donor to the museum of an important 1810 oil painting, "Gen. Nicolas Guye" by Spanish artist Francisco Goya.

His friend Virginia Governor Colgate W. Darden once said of Pratt: "He was priceless, that fellow. You don't have to have many like that to move a civilization forward."

Most of the millions Pratt disbursed in his will went to ten colleges and universities, nine of them in Virginia. He stipulated that the schools were to use the money for faculty salaries, scholarship and research, but not for construction or maintenance of buildings.