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An American’s Passion For British art: Paul Mellon’s legacy - Royal Academy, London

Michael Glover
Thursday 18 October 2007 00:00 BST
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Quietly posed: ‘Zebra’ by George Stubbs
Quietly posed: ‘Zebra’ by George Stubbs

Call him a shrewdly brilliant opportunist if you like. Paul Mellon, scion of a great American banking family, began to collect British art seriously in the 1960s. It couldn’t have been a better moment. Prices were low. Everyone who was anyone thought they knew that, historically speaking, British art didn’t really amount to much, and certainly not in comparison with, say, the French or the Italians. No, the Brits may have been majestic with words, but they hadn’t wrestled with paint or stone with the same degree of mastery or finesse.

So, relatively quickly, and certainly eagerly, Mellon, who had been a passionate Anglophile all his life – he had been baptised in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and he rode to hounds when at Cambridge University during the Thirties –began to buy British art at relatively knock-down prices. He was fonder of the old than of the new – his greatest purchases come from the 18th and 19th centuries. He bought well, and he also bought in quantity.

But Mellon did more than just buy British. He helped to create a climate of scholarly acceptance for British art – it began to be studied much more seriously because Mellon took such an interest in it, and threw so much money at it. Prices began to rise, so it was studied even more. Have you ever noticed that expensive things are taken more seriously than cheap ones?

In conjunction with Yale University Press, Mellon established a publishing programme devoted to the study of British artists that continues to this day. There is a tremendous amount of scholarly literature in existence about British art – just leaf through Yale University Press’ current catalogue – that would simply not have existed without the private passions of this unassuming billionaire.

This show at the Royal Academy brings together a small collection of the thousands of works – which take in paintings, sculptures, prints, book, maps and much else – that are currently held at the Yale Center for British Art in Newhaven, Connecticut, the building Mellon created to house and to show off his great collections.

Because he was a lover of horses, Stubbs was a lifelong passion, and there are several glorious Stubbs in this show, which opens with an entire room devoted to sporting art. The show itself is housed upstairs in the Sackler Wing galleries. These feel more modest than the downstairs galleries, and many of the paintings on display are on a modest scale, including some of the most brilliant.

Is the best of British art naturally fairly unassuming, or is that merely a platitudinous generalisation about the British character? It certainly feels that way in a room here devoted entirely to oil sketches by the likes of Constable, Turner, Cotman and many others. One of the most glorious works in this show – a cloud study by John Constable – is not much larger than a standard-format paperback book. It may look small, but when you stare into it, the sketch feels large enough, and deep enough, to drown in.

Examine the way in which Constable has suddenly looked up, and managed to catch the ever changing colours of the clouds – those snatches of salmon-pink, for example – on the wing. Elsewhere, Stubbs shows us an image of the very first zebra ever to make it to England’s shore. It is posed, so quietly, and so seemingly timorously, against what looks a painted backdrop of the most gently beguiling English woodland imaginable.

Best of all, though, examine the glorious trio of British rumps, all male, on display in Edward Francis Burney’s The Triumph of Music (1815), as they lean forward to examine the pianist’s music. Has any Italian – or any Frenchman – ever done better than this? It seems unlikely that they would ever have the temerity even to compete.

20 October to 27 January (0870 848 8484)

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