Sotheby’s has filed a $16.8 million lawsuit against the art collector and Internet entrepreneur Halsey Minor for refusing to pay the auction house for three paintings he bought in May.

The suit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, accuses him of breach of contract and demands that he cover the $13.8 million cost of the paintings in addition to late fees, interest and damages.

The works purchased by Mr. Minor include “The Peaceable Kingdom With the Leopard of Serenity” by Edward Hicks, which sold on May 22 for $9.6 million, a record for an American folk-art painting.

The auction attracted considerable interest because of the financial drama surrounding the painting’s seller, the jeweler Ralph O. Esmerian, who owed some $11.5 million to Sotheby’s in addition to $187 million to Merrill Lynch and $7.5 million to Christie’s.

Reached by phone, Diana Phillips, a spokeswoman for Sotheby’s, said that Mr. Minor had told the auction house that he had not paid for the works because he was owed money by other parties and could not afford to.

But Mr. Minor said in an interview on Thursday that he had not paid for the purchases because Sotheby’s had not disclosed its financial stake in the sale of “Peaceable Kingdom.”

Asked if he had the money to pay for the paintings, he said: “My net worth exceeds what’s owed by an order of magnitude. Their claim is preposterous.”

Mr. Minor said that Sotheby’s filed the suit only after he asked it to send him papers documenting its precise economic interest in the sale of the work.

But Ms. Phillips said the auction house had fully complied with all consumer regulations involving such disclosures. “We’ve been talking with him for some time about trying to resolve this,” she said. “He told us that the sole reason he had not paid was because others had failed to meet their financial obligations to him.”

“It was only a few days ago that he brought up this issue of financial disclosure,” Ms. Phillips added. “His explanation is just not credible.”

Through his San Francisco-based company, Minor Ventures, Mr. Minor is developing a hotel in Charlottesville, Va., and last year spent $15.3 million to buy Carter’s Grove, a 1755 plantation once owned and operated by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as a museum.

The entrepreneur, 43, who founded the technology news Web site CNet.com in the early ’90s, said he planned a countersuit against Sotheby’s. “Am I going to sue?” he said. “Absolutely. All they did was beat me to the punch.”

Besides “Peaceable Kingdom,” Mr. Minor bought Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” for about $300,000 and Childe Hassam’s “Paris, Winter Days” for $3.9 million. The lawsuit does not refer to any of the works by name.

‘”Peaceable Kingdom,” one of a series of paintings by Hicks inspired by the words of the prophet Isaiah, depicts assorted animals in a romantic pastoral scene. Its sale was a blow to the American Folk Art Museum, where it had hung since 2000. It was one of 400 works that had been promised to the institution by Mr. Esmerian, a chairman emeritus of the museum.