The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

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Profile: Paul Mellon
Gallery of Art, although in this case there were
exceptions; four of them were given to the Louvre,
three to the Fitzwilliam Museum in honour of its
former Director, Michael Jaffé, and two to the Yale
University Art Gallery.
In 1964, the Royal Academy mounted an
exhibition of British Art 1700-1850, which was
discreetly subtitled ‘from the collection of Mr and
Mrs Paul Mellon.’ By then it was clear to Paul Mellon
that what he had amassed over a period of five years
was more than a private collection; comprising some
1600 paintings together with many thousands of
prints, drawings and rare books it was the preeminent
collection of British art in private hands. No
major artist between Hogarth and Turner was
unrepresented, and many of his favourites, including
Joseph Wright (of Derby), Richard Wilson and John
Constable, by dozens of canvases. After a certain
amount of soul-searching, or rather weighing the
rival claims of Washington, Richmond and New
Haven, he announced his decision in 1966 to give
and bequeath the majority of his holdings of British
art to Yale University together with sufficient funds
to build and endow there the Yale Center for British
Art. ‘Since a university is a community of scholars,’
he explained, ‘a majority of them young scholars at
that; and since within its walls there is, or at least
should be, a sharing of interests and a crossfertilisation
of knowledge, it seemed to me that the
ferment of a university would enliven and stimulate
the study of and the enjoyment of these artistic
relics of our British inheritance, more vitally and
more resourcefully than if they were displayed in a
non-teaching institution.’ Again, there were a few
well-chosen exceptions from this allocation,
including several masterpieces to complement his
father’s gifts of British paintings for the National
Gallery of Art, sporting paintings for the Virginia
Museum, and gifts to the British Sporting Art Trust at
the Tate Gallery and to the Fitzwilliam Museum.
One of Paul Mellon’s gifts to the Fitzwilliam is a
painting by the eighteenth-century artist John
Wootton of A Race on the Beacon Course at
Newmarket. He made it largely to acknowledge the
pleasure he derived from spending two years as an
affiliated student at Clare College between 1929 and
1931. After four years at Yale he ‘found Cambridge
lectures dull and dry,’ but ‘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 candlelight.’ And
beyond Cambridge, ‘lovely Newmarket, its long
straight velvet training gallops, its racecourse, the most
beautiful one anywhere.’ As if to sum up those two
years in Cambridge where ‘I rode constantly, rowed
intermittently, and read a little’, this one example
serves to illustrate the very personal nature of the Paul
Mellon Collection, in spite of its vast extent. Before
buying major works, he often took the best advice
available, from John Rewald for Impressionist
paintings, from Basil Taylor for British art and
subsequently from the curators who worked for the
museums and galleries he supported, but the final
decision was always his own. ‘When I buy a painting,
some feature about it may remind me consciously or
unconsciously of some past event, thought, feeling,
moment of pleasure or even of sadness.’ And finally,
‘As anyone who has started to collect anything knows,
it is impossible to stop.’ The same might be said of his
habit of giving, which was just as personal and, it is
tempting to add, equally incurable.
Duncan Robinson
(Director of the Yale Center for British Art 1981-1995)
Sources
Paul Mellon with John Baskett, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, A Memoir, New York and London, 1992,
from which all quotations are taken.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.