The PB Collection of Asian Art was officially established in February 2023 as successor to the Daryl S. Paulson Collection, built in southwest Montana over several years beginning in the early 1970s and frequently loaned to the Department of Art History at Montana State University, Bozeman, from the early 2000’s.

The PB Collection is an assemblage of Asian art formed by Daryl S. Paulson with the support and coordination of Marsha Brown. Paulson enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1966 to participate in the Vietnam War and was stationed with the First Marine Division, the 5th Marine Regiment, at the An Hoa Combat Base, located near the Thu Bon River in Quang Nam Province (Central Republic of Vietnam). During the latter part of his four-year tour, he took R&R in Singapore where he met a broker with connections to the Chinese art market. By the early 1970s he had returned home and reestablished contact with the broker and every few months he would receive a shipment of art at the family farm in Great Falls. Despite the sudden halt in Asian art export permits brought on by rapid industrialization in China in the early 1980s, Paulson had succeeded in amassing a collection of hundreds of works from the Tang dynasty (618-906) to the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) over a decade. There followed several years of intense study of the Chinese philosophies of Buddhism and Daoism, informed collecting of affiliated art objects, and some publications on the nature of literati culture.

Paulson and Brown founded and successfully managed BioScience Laboratories Inc., a medical-pharmaceutical product research firm, in the Gallatin Valley for thirty years. Together they are dedicated to bolstering university, museum, archive and library programs and holdings in the United States.