Schaeffer's story, as told by BYU exhibition curator Paul Anderson, the Springville Art Museum's Vern Swanson (who serves as Schaeffer's art adviser) and Schaeffer himself, is a Horatio Alger tale, with a twist: Schaeffer's father was conscripted to work in a munitions factory after Schaeffer was born during World War II and largely disappeared from his life. His mother, unable to care for her two sons, put them in an orphanage.

Schaeffer was eventually adopted by a couple who worked as servants, his mother as a housemaid and his father as a chauffeur. While that life provided him with hand-me-downs and leftovers - "We were never hungry," he says - Schaeffer longed for a life that was more than servitude.

When he came of age, Schaeffer left Amsterdam and became a cabin boy on ships, ultimately making his way to Australia. After years as a "cadet" or store manager, for Woolworth's, he bought into a modest janitorial service, with some 25 employees. In the next 20 years, Schaeffer would build Tempo Services, Inc., into the 15th largest employer in Australia, with half a billion dollars in annual profit. By the 1970s, Schaeffer, now one of the richest men in Australia, had discovered art. He and his then-wife had purchased a stunning $20 million Victorian-era estate, called Rona, perched on Sydney's Elizabeth Bay and overlooking its famed Opera House. "Suddenly, we had all of these empty walls," Shaeffer said in a telephone interview from Sydney.

At first he collected etchings, then drawings, watercolors and finally oil paintings. A watershed moment was a trip to London in 1984, when he visited one of the first major shows of the pre-Raphaelites.

"And I fell in love," says Schaeffer. "Soon a hobby had become a passion and it was on its way." By the 1990s, Schaeffer was one of the most respected collectors of Victorian art, with roughly 400 paintings, some valued at their peak at up to $9 million. They included the famed 1769 painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, "The Archers," which, according to Swanson, Shaeffer "bought at auction on an impulse."

He 'loved well but not wisely: On the phone, Schaeffer pauses.

For a moment you hear him draw in a breath.

"Perhaps I have foolishly been very self-revealing," he tells a reporter. "For 16 years did I live in the most wonderful extraordinary Gothic mansion with the most glorious views and for 16 years I lived, as some naughty columnist once said, the Life of Riley. I collected hard, and I had a wonderful time, and now that time is over."

Schaeffer had borrowed to fund his art collection, including loans against his home and his shares in his own company. When the company hit hard times, creditors came calling.

He faced a very public case of personal insolvency. He had to sell off Rona, the larger portion of his stake in his business, and more poignantly, most of his art collection.

"The art world," Schaeffer says, "is at its best wonderful and exciting, and at its worst a dark and mysterious world in which one can become lost."

"John loved well but not wisely," Swanson says. "When encountering 'the pearl of great price,' I saw that he would be willing to - and would - suffer for it."

The high and the low: The Schaeffer BYU exhibition represents most of what remains. Forty paintings fill a single gallery - and though the show is small, roughly 38 paintings, it is extraordinarily ambitious and representative in its coverage.

The paintings on loan from Schaeffer span the middle and latter-day movements (1846-1916). The breadth of the exhibition, curated by Paul Anderson, allows viewers to examine Victorian social, political, economic and moral concerns.

The desire to be seen as one who sees, and to be known as one who knows, dominated the psyche of Victorian nouveau riche collectors. Collecting art, previously the province of the nobility, became not only a valid activity for Britain's new leisure class but the very process by which its social position would be solidified and validated.

That the work itself, as a whole and within individual paintings, embodies contradictions and ambivalence is no surprise. Most new collectors were self-made individuals who had risen from poverty, and the work that appealed to them naturally reflected their divided selves.

Anderson said the Victorians were obsessed with social justice, living as they did during a time of financial prosperity but also ardent political discussion about the working class.

In Richard Redgrave's "The Sempstress," a clock indicates that the exhausted woman sewing piecework in a dark garret has been doing so for hours with little progress and hence, little hope of recompense. In Faed's "Worn Out," a devoted laborer has fallen asleep after a similarly long night, his small child - angelic and febrile - holding in unconsciousness his father's tattered sleeve: heaven and Earth, the high and the low, connected by an enduring and tenuous string.

The Victorians were drawn toward the binary, and works like Edmund Blair Leighton's "Til Death Us Do Part" (1878-79), in which a downcast bride is led from an altar at which she has clearly chosen the wrong man, and Sir Edward John Poynter's "The Prodigal Son's Return" (1869), serve as morality plays.

But if Victorian painters presented their world melodramatically, perhaps it would take a 21st century collector, in loving and losing that work, to see through a glass darkly the more complex interplay of characters and their fate.

A mortal crossroads: Though Shaeffer is now much reduced, twice divorced, living in a rented apartment overlooking Sydney harbor, he has paid off all his creditors. His daughter recently gave birth to his first granddaughter, whom Schaeffer says "is of course the most bonny and beautiful child that ever was born."

Schaeffer still modestly collects but now, in his late 60s, seems more interested in divesting and sharing what is left. Some work he sells. Others he donates to museums.

"I am so lucky to have the collection visit the great Brigham Young University," he says. He plans a visit before it is taken down next August.

When he does, he'll be pointedly aware of one piece that is no longer part of his illustrious collection, and whose absence diminishes both the collection and the man.

At the height of his passion, Schaeffer purchased the famed Frederick Leighton bronze "An Athlete Struggling with a Python" (1877), in which a figure attempts to free himself from a snake coiled around his thigh and ankle. The sculpture catches the figure in the moment he seems to realize he is at a mortal crossroads: a fight for his own life.

"It, the snake, was my enormous art collection that helped to some degree to slightly undo me. But here I am."

He pauses.

"It is a parallel," he says, "that I have often thought of."

Masterworks at BYU museum

* "MASTERWORKS OF VICTORIAN ART: From the Collection of John H. Schaeffer" runs through Aug. 18 at the Brigham Young Museum of Art on the BYU campus in Provo.

* MUSEUM HOURS are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

* FOR MORE INFORMATION, call 801-422-8287.