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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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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.
Patron of a Nation 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 Cézanne 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.
The Collector’s Touch 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.
At
Home at Yale 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.
Of
Turf and the Man 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. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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