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Summer
1999
When Paul Mellon '29
died last February 1, at the age of 91, President Levin noted in
his tribute that "of the many thousands who have contributed
to Yale University, none has done more than he to shape and support
it." But that is a fact that many members of the Yale community
might be forgiven for not knowing.
Born to massive wealth,
Mellon as an undergraduate was on the Yale Daily News, the Yale
Literary Magazine, and was elected to Scroll and Key. Even then,
he was famously shy, but in his maturity he was also more interested
in the impact of his money than in its potential for self-advertisement.
Nary a building Mellon supported at Yale bears his name, and they
are are among the best on the campus. They include Morse and Stiles
Colleges, designed by Eero Saarinen and, of course, Louis Kahn's
Yale Center for British Art. But the work of Mellon's largesse extends
throughout the fabric of the institution: To the endowment of the
masterships and deanships
of the residential colleges; the purchase of the papers of Samuel
Johnson's biographer, James Boswell; the funding of Directed Studies,
the Humanities major, and Theater Studies; and support for professorships
in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the schools of Medicine,
Divinity, and Forestry and Environmental Studies.
At his death, Mellon
left Yale $90 million and more than 130 works of art-the largest
single gift ever to the University. But he also left behind a legacy
of authentic generosity to the nation as a whole, and of personal
warmth to a host of friends and professional colleagues.
Herewith, memories of
a unique individual by four who knew him well at Yale, and beyond.
--
The Editors
Patron
of a Nation
by J. Carter Brown
The Paul Mellon I knew
could be self-deprecating to the point of inscrutability, but beneath
what I believe to have been essentially his shyness was what I treasured
most about him-a warmth and a sense of fun and a delight in language
and, above all, a deeply felt responsiveness to beauty.
It is well known that
Paul's admitted first and last love was horses. He was revered as
joint Master of Foxhounds of the Piedmont Hunt, whose long runs
and challenging fences made it legendary in the hunting world. Winning
the 100-Mile Ride three times reminded everyone of his determination
and skill. I remember the priority given to meetings of his "turf
committee," to discuss exactly what kind of grass would increase
the chances of his home-bred horses' success. Although Paul tried
Florida for a while to put his racehorses into winter training,
and had a large operation in Aiken, South Carolina, his loyalty
to his farm, Oak Spring, near Upperville, Virginia, was justified
when homebred foals brought up at the Rokeby Stables home base covered
his American breeding operation with glory.
But he also had horses
in his beloved England, and his love of horses and of the English
countryside led him to his legendary collecting of English art.
Once he started, he couldn't stop. Upperville, which some art dealers
couldn't even locate in any work of reference, became one of the
best known addresses to U. S. Customs inspectors.
I remember being invited
to Oak Spring as a young assistant to the then-director of the National
Gallery of Art, Paul's childhood school friend from Pittsburgh,
the brilliant John Walker, to discuss the future of his vast English
collection. Johnny Walker was understandably eager that anything
Paul had come to the National Gallery. I hesitated to express how
I felt about the matter, but somehow mustered the recklessness to
say in that discussion that I thought the pictures would be better
given to Yale, where they could serve Yale's legendary scholarship
in the study of 18th-century English culture.
What I had in mind,
actually, was that maybe certain world masterpieces, like the Turner
"Dort" or the Constable "Hadleigh Castle," or
perhaps the great Stubbses, and, too, perhaps a couple of Boningtons-a
particular favorite of mine unrepresented in Washington-might well
go to the nation. But I also felt that if we were to build a second
building on the adjacent property that Andrew Mellon had earmarked
as a condition of his original gift, we would end up with a collection
in one school that already would outnumber all the paintings at
the National Gallery of all other schools combined.
I hadn't reckoned with
the persuasive effectiveness of Yale's Jules Prown, the first director
of the Center for British Art, and his successor, Ted Pillsbury.
As the opening of the Yale Center drew near, I could see Paul's
own desire to see his whole collection in the English field kept
and shown together (something which he recognized was against the
policy of the National Gallery since its inception).
But with typical thoughtfulness,
he made it a point to fill in at the Gallery later, promising us
a wonderful Stubbs, buying us a Bonington, giving us some English
drawings and paintings. And he served the nation so proudly, giving
and promising more than 1,000 works of art, largely French and American,
and, in addition, contributing princely funds both inter vivos and
by bequest, and, above all, with his sister Ailsa, making possible
our East Building. Surely no one connected with the Gallery could
possibly complain!
The ten-year project
that resulted in the East Building led to our greatest personal
bond. How well I remember the day when, with great trepidation,
I went to lunch at Paul's house on Whitehaven Street in Washington-with
its van Gogh paintings and Cezanne watercolors and charming
small self-portraits personally hung by him-bringing along I.M.
Pei, the architect I so hoped he would approve for the Gallery's
new building to the east. I needn't have worried. As we sat at the
small round table in the corner of the dining room, eschewing the
formality of the main mahogany table, looking out into the exquisite
garden designed by Paul's wife, Bunny, and sipping a Bordeaux that
was up to Pei's standard (which is saying a great deal), I found
these two men, both sons of prominent bankers, to be completely
on each other's wavelength.
Paul chaired a small
Building Committee, which included the Gallery's vice chairman (and
fellow horse- and Yale-lover) Jock Whitney; Paul's lawyer from Sullivan
& Cromwell; the construction consultant, Carl Morse; and the
Gallery's new director. We were able to schedule the meetings, which
would take place in his charming townhouse on East 70th Street,
so that he never missed a single one. Although Paul hardly spoke
at them, his passion for the project, and, as he called it, "doing
it right," inspired us all.
Thinking beyond the
construction period, I found myself often arguing for cuts on the
basis of the dizzyingly escalating costs, at the period that had
the steepest inflationary curve in American construction history.
I was fearful of wearing out the institution's welcome with the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which Paul and his sister had created,
and which became essential to the completion of the project. But
time after time, Paul would approve Pei's recommendations.
I think he took enormous
satisfaction in the way the building came out, and that not only
the architectural profession, which voted it one of the ten best
American buildings of all time, but millions of visitors since,
have shared that enthusiasm.
In Virginia, in London,
and in Cambridge, but nowhere more than in Washington and New Haven,
Paul Mellon's dedication to quality, his understated generosity,
his love of the humanities, and his passion for the beautiful live
on.
J.
Carter Brown is director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art.
The
Collector's Touch
by John Baskett
Two weeks before Paul
Mellon died, his delightful friend Billy Wilbur and I were seated
at his bedside exchanging stories and talking about the hereafter
when Mr. Mellon instructed us to go to his clothes closet and choose
anything we wanted. We dutifully moved into the next room and started
rummaging about in the cupboard, Billy muttering "Oh! I feel
so guilty," when a voice from the bedroom called through to
say, "Leave me a suit to get buried in."
Billy Wilbur has his memories of hunting seasons and 100-Mile Ride
competitions shared with his old friend while I, too, can look back
on a wonderful relationship that lasted for more than 38 years.
I arrived in Virginia in the late fall of 1961, just as the first
snow was falling, and was to spend the next two years as Mr. Mellon's
private curator. Within a couple of weeks we were off to New York,
and as I stepped into his private plane he inquired whether I had
enough money for the trip. Of course, within 24 hours I was penniless
and was obliged to pay him a visit.
At that time Mr. Mellon and his wife had a suite at the Carlyle
Hotel while their house on East 70th Street was being refurbished.
Mr. Mellon was always the perfect host. He showed me the paintings
in the apartment, and then we had coffee. Finally he said he expected
I had a lot of things to do, and I was escorted to the door. In
near panic, I blurted out that I had run out of money. Mr. Mellon
felt his pockets and exclaimed that he hadn't got any either, so
he made a telephone call and someone appeared with a large wad of
bills. Mr. Mellon looked very concerned and asked where I was staying.
On being told it was some uptown hotel, he told me to move immediately
to the St. Regis. So perhaps, without realizing it, I had been rather
clever.
I worked hard, for there was plenty to do. Pictures were arriving
by the boat-load and sometimes by plane-load because civil cargo
jet aircraft were just coming into service. Mr. Mellon's Virginia
combination museum and repository, the modestly named Brick House,
where I had a suite in the west wing, had just one visitor, who
usually arrived on a Saturday morning dressed in hunting pink. He
was as enthusiastic as I, and we had long telephone conversations
with his English adviser, Basil Taylor. I regarded Basil as my guru.
He was a wonderfully intelligent and cultivated man who felt an
almost evangelical mission to further knowledge and interest in
British art. Between them, he and Paul Mellon certainly succeeded
in that aim.
Paul Mellon's collecting of British art stemmed from a meeting at
Claridge's Hotel in London with Basil Taylor in 1960 when, over
coffee, it was decided in a quite informal way that he would be
the collector and Basil would act as his unpaid adviser. At the
age of 53 Mr. Mellon, although having acquired the Abbey Collection
of color-plate books illustrative of scenery, life, and travel in
England and the continent, and having built up a collection of books
illustrated by William Blake as well as a sporting library, had
only bought a handful of English paintings to date. Among these
was a Stubbs portrait of the racehorse Pumpkin, which he had purchased
24 years earlier and which would remain one of his favorites. I
doubt, however, whether either man seated drinking his coffee in
the hotel foresaw the full implications of what would follow upon
their meeting.
British art was not held in high regard in its native land at that
time. There was a plentiful supply, and prices were low. As a result,
by 1963, a veritable avalanche of material had descended upon the
Brick House. Although we never talked about it, I soon realized
that the holdings were growing well beyond the bounds of what a
private collector might wish to enjoy. Mr. Mellon always played
the cards close to his chest, but in a speech at an exhibition of
this large nucleus of his collection in Richmond, Virginia, in April
1963, he intimated that it would be destined for the public domain.
At a time during that summer he invited me to lunch at the Metropolitan
Club in Washington and we talked of suitable locations as repositories
for the collection. Property he owned in northwest Washington, the
National Gallery of Art, and Yale University were mentioned as possibilities.
By late fall, when I was due to leave Mr. Mellon's employment, I
had become engaged to be married to an English girl whom I had earlier
recommended to him as an assistant to his librarian. I tried to
break the news to Mr. Mellon on one of the Saturday morning visits,
but I thought he suspected, seeing my look of embarrassment, that
the whole thing had been a put-up job. When all was revealed, however,
it transpired that his family had been laying bets among themselves
on the outcome. He was delighted and sent us home first-class on
the Queen Mary buried under cases of Mo't & Chandon champagne.
Thirty-eight years is a long time for any relationship, and over
that period, during which I made more than 140 trips to the United
States, Mr. Mellon changed from being a kindly employer into a father
figure, and then into an old friend. His personality also developed.
When first I knew him, he was still very shy. He had led a largely
private life and, as Basil Taylor once remarked to me, he was not
unlike a latter-day English squire.
Although I never felt familiarity was called for, he seemed to become
much more approachable in conversation, and of course his wonderful
sense of humor and appreciation of the comic element in life helped
to form an immutable bond. Only over a long period did I discover
from others the many considerate and kind acts he had performed.
Back in England I established an art dealership in London, and Mr.
Mellon naturally became a supportive and valued client. On his periodic
trips to London, the windows of the art dealers up and down Bond
Street and St. James's filled overnight with English pictures! In
1977 the Yale Center for British Art opened and Mr. Mellon invited
all the London art trade and English art historians to come over
as his guests.
He and I traveled around Europe together in the 1980s in his airplane,
visiting the public art galleries and echoing in some ways the journeys
made by his father and Henry Clay Frick a century earlier. When
I retired in 1990, Mr. Mellon made his last purchase through me,
a bust of Alexander Pope by Francis Roubiliac. He presented it to
the Center in memory of Basil Taylor out of respect and gratitude
but also-and this was typical of Mr. Mellon-because he thought Taylor
looked rather like Pope.
John
Baskett assisted Paul Mellon in the writing of Reflections
in a Silver Spoon, his autobiography.
At
Home at Yale
by Jules Prown
Paul Mellon decided
that Yale would be the best home for his British art because not
only would much of the art he loved be on display, but the collection
would be used actively for the study of the English life and culture
that meant so much to him. It had been at Yale that his Anglophilia
was honed by such great teachers as Chauncey Tinker and William
Lyon Phelps.
Immediately after the public announcement in 1967 of Paul Mellon's
intended gift to Yale of his collection along with funds to build
and operate a Center to house it, the President of the University,
Kingman Brewster, named a committee, chaired by Professor Louis
Martz of the English Department, to plan the Center's programmatic,
physical, and financial requirements. At that time I was a newly
tenured associate professor of
the history of art and curator of American art at the Yale University
Art Gallery. Andrew Ritchie, director of the Gallery, and I constituted
a subcommittee to focus on the museum aspects of the planning. That
summer the committee flew to Osterville on Cape Cod to meet with
Paul and launch its deliberations. At the airport we were met by
several automobiles, including a brand new gray Mercedes with yellow
leather upholstery and Paul at the wheel. En route to Paul's house,
Louis Martz in the front passenger seat turned to Paul and expressed
his admiration for the car. "You like it?" Paul inquired
rhetorically. "My racing colors, you know!" A signal-with
Paul it was horses first, art second, just as with art it was the
National Gallery first, Yale second. But second with Paul was a
good place to be, unless you were a horse.
Andrew Ritchie, a Scot by birth, liked British art and had been
instrumental in convincing Paul to give his collection to Yale.
Nonetheless, he had further hopes on behalf of the Art Gallery.
Once, on a visit to Paul's home in Upperville, Virginia, as the
committee went in to dinner, Paul firmly guided Andrew to a chair
at the center of a long table with a wall of French Impressionist
masterpieces behind him. Indicating a large English sporting picture
on the opposite wall, Paul said, barely concealing a smile, "I
wanted you to have a good view of that fine English painting."
"But Paul," Andrew protested impishly as he gazed at the
horse, "you know I have eyes in the back of my head."
Some months after the Martz committee report was submitted and accepted,
I was summoned to the President's house on Hillhouse Avenue, where
Kingman Brewster and Paul Mellon invited me to become director of
the projected Center. I accepted. Brewster told me that my first
task was to recommend an architect to him and the Corporation. Paul,
with characteristic reticence, never expressed a preference for
a particular architect, but followed the search carefully. When
I became interested in Louis Kahn, Paul and I visited Fort Worth
to meet with my friend Rick Brown, director of the Kimbell Art Museum,
to study the plans and model for their forthcoming Kahn building.
For his part, Kahn elected to talk to Paul about his architecture
at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. On our visit there
during breakfast with Jonas Salk, Lou discussed his work and his
philosophy of architecture, animatedly drawing on paper napkins.
Midway on our drive with Dr. Salk to the Institute, Paul, ever the
collector, lamented his failure to pick up the napkins.
Often when I was with Paul the conversation would drift from British
art, about which he knew more than I (an Americanist by trade) to
horses, about which I knew virtually nothing. Once, in 1970, after
Fort Marcy won the Washington International and was named Horse
of the Year, Paul said that the horse would not race again. Eager
to display my limited knowledge, I asked if he were going to put
Fort Marcy out to stud. Paul gave me a pitying look-the horse was
a famous gelding.
On another occasion I had a meeting with Paul at his East 70th Street
house in New York City. After lunch, as he shuffled through papers
and photographs related to what he called his cats and dogs-small
issues that needed resolution-he grew increasingly restive. Finally
he said, "Would you like to go to Aqueduct?" He had a
promising young horse running. Off we went. The horse ran well,
but placed second. Afterwards, as I stood talking with Paul and
his trainer, I noticed that they were glaring at me. "It's
his orange tie!" So I learned that one should never wear orange
at the track with Paul.
Paul was an ideal donor, generous and non-interfering. His philosophy
was that those who had to live with the results of his benefactions
should make the decisions. But he liked to be kept apprised of what
was happening and have an opportunity "to put his oar in."
When he did have a serious reservation or concern, he usually expressed
it mildly or elliptically in the form of a question. "Do you
really think it is a good idea to park cars under my British pictures?"
He clearly did not.
Shortly after I became director of the Center, Paul expressed to
me his concerns about the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art,
which he had established a few years earlier in London. The Foundation
had undertaken an ambitious publishing program, and projections
showed that escalating costs would impose a heavy future drain on
his foundations, which were supporting it. He asked whether Yale
would take over the London operation, with no strings or preconditions,
if he gave the University $5 million for the purpose. I was enthusiastic
about having a base in London, but to my surprise Kingman Brewster,
to whom I put the proposition while he was having his portrait painted
in the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, was not. He was wary
of overseas entanglements, and it was only after some time and effort
that I was able to persuade him to accept the offer. Since then,
the successor organization, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art in London, has made a tremendous contribution to scholarship
in the field of British art. And, in view of Paul's modesty in finally
not allowing his name to be attached to the Yale Center, it is appropriate
that the London branch bears his name.
During the early years of planning for the Center, I visited Paul
regularly to review plans for the building as they evolved, sometimes
in New York but more frequently in Washington, where I familiarized
myself with the collection. Some pictures hung in a building on
Whitehaven Street which served as curatorial headquarters for paintings;
others were stored on racks in a large vault at the National Gallery;
his sporting pictures and rare books were displayed at Upperville.
Once construction began, Paul would fly to New Haven periodically
for meetings with Kahn, Brewster, and others, and for a hard-hat
tour of the building. I always got a kick out of seeing his Gulfstream
jet with its identification number, 1929Y, Paul's equivalent of
a class sweatshirt.
The British Art Center was designed and built at a time of runaway
inflation. It was budgeted at $10 million, but when the plan was
sent out to bid, the cost came in at $17 million. Kahn thereupon
redesigned the building, cutting the size by a third. Paul indicated
in his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, that
he preferred the reduced version of the building. Over the years
since the Center opened to the public in 1977, Paul Mellon enjoyed
periodic visits and the opportunity to commune with the works of
art that gave him such great pleasure.
Toward the end of his life he helped plan the creation of the Founder's
Room on the fourth floor of the Center, which contains works of
art, books, photographs, and other objects, including his Cambridge
oars, that carried special personal meaning for him.
Of all the institutions with which he was connected and which benefited
from his generosity, the Yale Center for British Art is the place
where he chose to be memorialized.
Jules
Prown, the founding director of the Yale
Center for British Art, is the Paul Mellon Professor of the
History of Art.
Of
Turf and the Man
by Duncan Robinson
A life-long Anglophile,
Paul Mellon in a 1963 speech tried to explain the sources of his
affection: "From 1907 until 1914, from my first year to my
seventh, my parents spent almost every summer in England, and my
sister and I were invariably taken with them. I suppose it was in
those summers that I first developed a taste for the English countryside,
for English houses, English rivers, English parks, English skies,
English clouds."
Paul Mellon's parents met in mid-Atlantic, that ocean which shrank
during his lifetime from a body of water that required several days
to cross by boat, to one that could be hopped in three hours by
Concorde. He must long ago have lost count of the number of times
he crossed it himself, traveling from his father's to his mother's
country. His love of England was, quite simply, his birthright,
although it was deepened significantly by his teachers at Yale-Tinker,
Phelps, French, and DeVane among others-who "confirmed my predilection
for things English and for things old." There was an inevitability
about the next step in Paul Mellon's career. Instead of following
in his father's footsteps into the family bank, he set sail for
England, to study its history at Clare College, Cambridge. As he
wrote later in life:
"Cambridge I loved, and I loved its grey walls, its grassy
quadrangles, St. Mary's bells, its busy, narrow streets, full of
men in black gowns, King's Chapel and Choir and candle-light, the
coal-fire smell, and walking across the quadrangle in a dressing
gown in the rain to take a bath."
When I went up to Clare 33 years later, not that much had changed.
Gas had replaced coal in the fireplaces, but the baths were still
across the courtyard, and men in black gowns, the University's Proctors,
continued to patrol the streets after dark to enforce the dress
code for undergraduates who strayed into the town. Today's undergraduates
would have far more difficulty in tracing similarities between their
Cambridge and the one I have described, at a distance of a further
30 years, not least in the far greater rate of inflation in the
cost of student accommodation! But there was one great difference
between Paul Mellon's generation and mine. It can be inferred from
the words of Henry James, written at the beginning of the century:
"The burden is necessarily greater for an American- for he
must deal, more or less, if only by implication, with Europe; whereas
no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one
calls him less complete for not doing so."
James went on to predict that "a hundred years hence he will
doubtless be counted so." His only mistake was one of timing;
by mid-century the transatlantic tide had turned towards the shores
of North America. I joined that westward flow in 1965, when I was
awarded a Mellon Fellowship by Clare College for two years' study
at Yale.
After the intellectual stimulus of Yale, Paul Mellon found Cambridge's
academic rituals somewhat dry and arcane. Looking back on his two
years at Clare he gave a new definition to the three Rs: rowing,
riding and, trailing way behind in third place, reading.
Above all, just beyond Cambridge, to the east, lay "lovely
Newmarket, its long straight velvet training gallops, its race-course,
to me the most beautiful one anywhere." If Andrew Mellon had
had misgivings about his son's academic ambitions, he was far more
scathing about his interest in the turf: "Any damn fool knows
that one horse can run faster than another," he growled. Even
so, in 1933 Paul Mellon bought his first racehorse, the Irish thoroughbred,
Drinmore Lad. When Drinmore Lad ran as a 3-year-old and won a timber
race at Far Hills, New Jersey, his owner's fate was sealed. For
the next 65 years the name of Paul Mellon was to be one of the most
prominent in racing circles on both sides of the Atlantic; along
with his colors-grey and gold in America, black and gold in England.
And it was no coincidence that the first painting he bought, in
1936, was a portrait of a famous 18th-century racehorse, Pumpkin,
with his stable lad, painted by George Stubbs.
I remember several years ago having a long and enthusiastic conversation
with the writer Peter Chew about Paul Mellon's indivisible attachments
to sport and art. His championship of Stubbs seemed to me to be
the key and I went on to draw a parallel between Mr. Mellon and
Stubbs' original patrons, the Earl of Grosvenor and the Marquess
of Rockingham. Chew was writing an article for The Blood Horse
and, to my embarrassment, he quoted me at length. One sample, in
bold type, read: "Rockingham was one of Stubbs' most important
patrons in the 1760s. He was a Stubbs fancier in much the way Mr.
Mellon is now. He was basically a breeder who employed Stubbs to
paint his most famous horses." I waited nervously for some
reaction from Virginia. Nothing came until I received another copy
of the magazine with the offending article, this one from Rokeby
Stables. Inside was a card, reproducing John Sell Cotman's drawing
of an artist's palette and brushes, portfolio and easel mounted
on a horse with a short, typed message inside: "This proves
that we 'Racetrackers' know our Art too! Paul." Later I discovered
that he had sent it to all of his racing friends. And from then
onwards, I always received the annual lists of "Horses in Training,
Broodmares, Yearlings and Foals" at Rokeby Stables in Virginia
and with Ian Balding at Kingsclere in Berkshire.
The naming of the yearlings was an annual exercise in which Mr.
Mellon took great pleasure, often canvassing his friends for suggestions,
but always coming up with the best answers himself. Here too, he
succeeded in weaving together the strands of his life as a connoisseur
of the horse and art as well as his institutional loyalties. In
1930, when one of his mother's English friends gave him a chestnut
mare, he called her Lady Clare. In 1983, the two-year-old by Little
Current out of Gliding By was named Clare Bridge. The two-year-old
named Master of Arts in 1985 resulted from the unions of Arts and
Letters with Class Day and Reviewer with Hillhouse High. Of course
Rokeby Venus, Goose Creek, and Mill Reef all derived from Mellon
estates.
In 1997, when Mack Miller retired from training, Mr. Mellon decided
to no longer race in America. He assured his friends however that
he would continue to breed "about a dozen broodmares at Rokeby
in order to have the pleasure of seeing mares, foals, weanlings,
and yearlings in our fields." For him that was closely related
to the allied pleasure he derived from the contents of his Brick
House, where Pumpkin, Lustre, Eclipse and Hyena, those masterpieces
of 18th-century thoroughbreeding and painting were kept in his other
stable, or private picture gallery. To give him the last word it
is only necessary to recall his answer to the interviewer who wanted
to know which of his two galleries, the East Building in Washington,
or the Yale Center in New Haven, he regarded as his proudest achievement.
He deflected the question with a quiet smile by answering both-after
winning the Derby.
Duncan
Robinson, director of the Yale Center for British Art from 1981-95,
is director and Marlay Curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University
of Cambridge.
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