Heywood Fralin likes to work behind the scenes.

Roanoke's new art museum is named for donors Nicholas and Jenny Taubman. But few have had more influence over the museum in the past 10 years than Fralin.

Fralin is chief executive officer of Medical Facilities of America, a nursing home chain. He also is administrator of a trust fund created by his brother, developer Horace Fralin , who died in 1993.

Horace and his wife, Ann Fralin, were supporters of the museum, and Heywood Fralin has administered the trust accordingly.

From 1999 through June 2007, the trust gave at least $13.5 million to the art museum, tax records show. If the trust's disbursements kept pace in fiscal year 2007-2008, its total contributions to the museum would rival or exceed the $15 million contributed by the Taubmans so far.

But there's a difference: For the first several years, the Fralin trust money went into paintings, not bricks and mortar.

Beginning in 1999, Heywood Fralin used the trust's assets ($48 million in fiscal 2006-07) to buy paintings by artists such as Winslow Homer, Norman Rockwell and John Singer Sargent that would have been pipe dreams in the museum's earlier years.