ORONO — At a Sotheby’s auction in November in New York, Museum of Art Director Wally Mason was looking to strengthen the UMaine collection. Artist Eric Fischl was one of the names on his wish list.

Mason knew the color etching “Year of the Drowned Dog,” widely considered Fischl’s best print work, would be out of his budget ballpark. He went for another Fischl print, but returned to Maine empty-handed after high-pitched bidding left him in the dust.

Just half a year later, Mason leans back in his office chair and looks up at the yellow sand and blue-green water of “Year of the Drowned Dog.” One of just 35 prints, the framed work on the wall is a milestone of modern art, and a milestone acquisition for the small Orono museum.

The well-known Fischl is part of a major gift from Robert Venn Carr Jr., a 1938 UM graduate who has given an art collection worth more than $2 million to his alma mater. Mason picked up three dozen pieces last month at the Carr home in Torrington, Conn. Another 70 works on loan to the museum will stay permanently.

Carr, 81, who found success with travel and insurance businesses, began collecting art after his 1980 retirement. He first donated more than 150 prints to the university in the mid-1980s. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he has been in a Vermont nursing home since January. His son, Rob, orchestrated the latest wave of generosity.

“I thought it would be beneficial to get them into the students’ hands,” the collector’s only child said. He said his father was an unusually ethical businessman, a self-made success who believed in giving something back.

His son said Carr was in some ways a shy man who wasn’t comfortable “glad-handing.” He loved to travel and covered most of the globe, and he cared about art as art, not just as an investment.

“He bought voraciously, and he bought smarter than most people,” Mason said of the museum’s benefactor. “There’s no evidence that he ever sold anything. That indicates that he trusted his eye and committed himself to the works — he knew they were going to hold up.”

While most collectors rely on art dealers to tell them what to invest in, Carr educated himself and made his own decisions. Mason points to a long bookshelf in his office packed with art books and catalogues — part of Carr’s private library, sent by his son to accompany the collection.

Pull a book from the shelf, and it’s almost a sure thing one of the works featured now belongs to the university. Scraps of paper mark newly relevant pages in “Prints of the 20th Century: A History,” “The Contemporary Print” and other books Mason describes as “bibles” of 20th century printmaking.

Talking about the gift with colleagues around the country, Mason need only mention page numbers in the volumes to point out highlights of the windfall. A Robert Motherwell print owned by Carr graces the cover of one fat book — further evidence of the collector’s gift for selecting significant works.

The prints collected by Carr are original works produced in series from plates made of wood, metal or other materials by the artists. One of the oldest art forms, printmaking dates back to 15th century Germany and developed even earlier in primitive forms in Egypt and China.

Plates can be made by cutting a block of wood with a knife, burning designs into metal with acid, molding plaster casts, drafting designs with stencils, wax crayons, and other processes. Their creation often requires a workshop of technical assistants working under the artist’s direction.

Prints arriving from the Carr homes in Connecticut and North Palm Beach include a delicate Francesco Clemente portrait in fruity kiwi and apricot. The gift list reads like an art history textbook, with Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Red Grooms, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Rene Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Susan Rothenberg and Andy Warhol. Most are painters who also work in printmaking.

A Frank Stella with lively pink and orange accents wears a title like a rock around its neck, “And the Holy One Blessed Be He Came and Smote the Angel of Death.”

The big names are outnumbered by artists’ artists — works that mean much more to insiders than the general public. Mason has found that Carr gravitated toward vibrant color and abstraction, and unlike many collectors, he had no fear of things that looked different.

“He seemed to step away from media heroes,” toward “grittier” work, Mason said. Many artists represented are ones who worked out of the public eye but closer to the edge.

Carr’s series of five untitled prints by Elizabeth Murray, for example, are universally disliked by the museum staff, but have real significance in the history of art, said Mason.

Rob Carr said his father’s interest in art probably developed early on. He grew up in Connecticut, the son of English parents who valued education, and studied civil engineering at the University of Maine.

Carr was an engineer for the city of Bridgeport, Conn., and General Motors before branching out into travel and insurance. He bought his first art in the 1950s, before he could afford the caliber of works he would eventually own.

Later, the collector would invest in prints while they were still in the planning stages, based on his belief in the artist and the work’s likely quality. To do that with success “you would have to have a sense of what was going on beyond the obvious,” Mason said.

Carr bought about 30 works a year for 10 years — a rate that suggests he took the collection on as a full-time job. Mason doesn’t think he was one who stockpiled art because it was trendy. “He made too many good choices,” the museum director said.

Mason said Carr’s total donation of 275 works has given UMaine’s museum unprecedented depth.

“We had highlights and good pieces, but our collection was cursory, at best, without them,” he said. “In terms of our direction, it puts us in very good shape.”

The museum’s primary direction, art since 1955, has been more clearly defined and largely filled in by the Carr collection. American and English prints are particular strengths. The new riches make the remaining gaps stand out more vividly, Mason said. A missing early Warhol will be his next acquisition project, and there is a need for work produced since 1990.

Already, Mason feels Carr has moved the museum into an elite circle.

“Throw these on top, and we’re competitive with any small museum in New England,” he said.

Rob Carr said the gift was a natural, logical act for his father.

“It made sense to him,” he said.