From The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America:

“An American artist of rare distinction” is how Katherine Dreier described Arthur Dove in the catalogue for the 1926 Brooklyn exhibition, which included three earlier works by the artist that she had borrowed from gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Dreier acquired Sunrise III in 1948, some ten years after it was painted, from New York’s Downtown Gallery, in exchange for a Dove watercolor already in her possession. As Dreier wrote to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe in March 1948, she desired an image “more worthy of Dove to have in our Collection of the Société Anonyme. . . . Besides, it will only benefit Dove to have him at Yale University.” Dreier promptly gifted Sunrise III to the Collection Société Anonyme at Yale in 1949. The idea of universality suggested by the painting’s concentric rings surely would have appealed to Dreier, a Theosophist who strongly believed in the “cosmic forces,” as she called them, which govern the universe.