Paul Mellon: A Philanthropic Life

Paul Mellon: A Philanthropic Life I

There is no intellectual or emotional substitute for the authentic, the original, the unique masterpiece 

Paul mellon

Paul Mellon, renowned art collector, horse breeder, sportsman, and conservationist, hailed from one of the most affluent families of the twentieth century. He followed his personal hopes and ambitions, which helped to create a world of philanthropy like no other. Many continue to benefit from his generosity, and many have been influenced by this private man’s benevolent spirit. His contributions to the world of art, along with his efforts to preserve picturesque landscapes and seascapes, have given gifts of beauty, enjoyment, and tranquility to millions of people.

Paul Mellon was born on June 11, 1907, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Andrew William Mellon (1855–1937) and Nora Mary McMullen (1879–1973). He had one sibling, an older sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce (1901–1969). His father was a successful banker and industrialist who served as the United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932 through three successive presidential administrations: Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), and Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). Hoover appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1932, and in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) extended that appointment.

Paul’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Alexander Mellon (1813–1908), emigrated from Ireland to Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1818. He attended the University of Pittsburgh in 1834. After graduation in 1837, he began a successful law firm, eventually becoming a judge in 1859. In 1843, Thomas married Sarah Jane Negley (1817–1909) and of their eight children, only five survived to adulthood. Thomas invested his earnings wisely, and in 1872 opened his first bank, T. Mellon and Sons. Thomas laid the foundation for the Mellon family’s prosperity, but it was mainly through the activities of Andrew William Mellon and his brothers Thomas Alexander Mellon II (1844–1899), James Ross Mellon (1846–1934), and Richard Beatty Mellon (1858–1933) that the family fortune was built. The Mellon family developed a formidable range of business ventures and in the early 1900s, the Mellons were among the wealthiest and most prominent bankers and industrialists in the United States.

In 1912, when Paul was quite young, his parents divorced. He grew up mainly in Pittsburgh where he attended Shady Side Academy, an exclusive private elementary school. During summer breaks, he spent time with his mother in Hertfordshire, where he became enamored with the English countryside. He especially enjoyed horseback riding with his mother, and later in life, the rolling hills and lush meadows of England heavily influenced his collecting of British art.

At the age of 13, Paul began his studies at the elite Choate Preparatory School in Wallingford, Connecticut. It was at this time that Paul developed a genuine fondness for writing. Before graduating in 1925, he wrote the school’s hymn and he contributed regularly to its literary publication, The Choate Literary Magazine. His poem, “Beauty Came,” was just one of many that displays his clever and artful ability to verbalize his thoughts.

Paul Mellon leaning against a haystack, Oak Spring, ca. 1952. Photograph by Thomas Neil Darling, courtesy of Howard Allen Photography, LLC, Middleburg, VA.

90 Beauty Came — 

Out of a musty, Gloomy room, Into a garden Rich in bloom.

As in the springtime, After rain, Sun in the wet leaves Shines again.

Out of a raging, Wild typhoon, Into a sunny, Blue lagoon.

Night in the summer, With the sky Bright with the north lights Sweeping by.

As when the embers Leap to flame— So to this dull mould Beauty Came.

Paul continued his studies at Yale University, where he especially enjoyed classes in English literature, history, and art. He wrote for the Yale Daily News and the Yale Literary Magazine. His studies contributed to him becoming an enthusiastic Anglophile and he graduated with honors in 1929.

In 1931, Paul decided to continue his studies at Clare College, University of Cambridge, to further explore English culture. During this time, he also developed two lifelong passions: thoroughbred racing and foxhunting. In particular, the thrill of racing fueled a newfound aspiration to engage seriously with horse breeding and horse racing. Paul purchased his first racehorse, Drinmore Lad, a steeplechaser, in 1933.

After Cambridge, following his father’s wishes, Paul returned to Pittsburgh and took a clerical position at Mellon Bank; he also worked temporarily at other family enterprises. However, Paul knew all along that he never wanted a career in any of his family’s businesses. His primary interests from early in life were always horse racing and developing a collection of exceptional art.

In 1935, Paul married Mary Elizabeth Conover Brown (1904–1946), and soon after their wedding they moved to Rokeby Farm, a fourhundred-acre estate originally acquired by Andrew Mellon, where Paul began his horse breeding and horse racing ventures. The young couple, Paul and Mary, had a large neo-Georgian mansion designed and built on the property by the architect William Adams Delano (1874–1960) of Delano & Aldrich. The Mellons’ new home, which they called the Brick House, was completed in 1941. Paul and Mary had two children—a daughter, Cathy (Catherine Mellon Conover), born in 1936, and a son, Tim (Timothy Mellon), born in 1942. Mary was the daughter of a doctor from Kansas City, Kansas, but she studied in the East and graduated from Vassar College with a degree

in French. She also studied French for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as a further year at Columbia University in New York. In his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, Paul Mellon described her as “vivacious and impulsively enthusiastic, easy to talk to, and interested in all kinds of things…but her main interest was music. She sang and played the piano with gusto.” 1

By 1936, the Mellons were turning Rokeby into a working horse farm, and they began to purchase additional land that bordered their estate. Around the same time, Paul began to collect rare books, extraordinary British art, as well as all manner of sporting art. One of his first and favorite purchases was an oil painting by George Stubbs (1724–1806), Pumpkin with a Stable-lad (1774). Paul went on to buy numerous other works by Stubbs, along with other eighteenth-century English masters such as Henry Alken (1785–1851), William Blake (1757–1827), John Constable (1776–1837), Benjamin Marshall (1767–1835), Thomas Rowlandson (1756/57–1827), James Seymour (1702–1752), and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851).

In 1937, Andrew Mellon passed away, and Paul inherited both riches and new responsibilities. Now he had to help oversee the fortunes resulting from the business acumen of his shrewd father. It also fell to Paul to complete his father’s plans to create what is now the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It had been Andrew’s wish not only that his personal art collection be given to the nation for the enjoyment of all Americans, but also that it be housed in a new national art gallery. Paul writes in his autobiography, “In the course of the final years of Father’s life he was closely involved in the planning stages of the National Gallery building. During his last months he had been shown outline plans by his architect, John Russell Pope, but illness and old age denied him the pleasure of watching his grand scheme come to fruition. In all meaningful discussions about the Gallery Father consulted David Finley, who was to become the Gallery’s first Director.” 2 Paul continues, “After Father’s death it was left to me, together with my co-trustees in the A. W. Mellon Education and Charitable Trust…and David Bruce (my brother-in-law, who had been appointed a trustee in 1934) to see the plan through.” 3

Construction of the National Gallery of Art began in June of 1937 and was completed in 1941. At the dedication ceremony on March 17, 1941, Paul Mellon hoped “that the Gallery would become a joint enterprise on the part of the Government, on the one hand, and of magnanimous citizens on the other, and that it would not become a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.” 4 Andrew bequeathed 115 stunning works of art to the new gallery, and Paul went on to serve on its board for forty years.

After Andrew’s passing, Paul and Mary traveled to Europe and spent six months in Switzerland with the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Together the couple discussed Mary’s bouts with asthma and Paul’s mixed feelings about how best to move forward in his life since his father’s death. Overall, these efforts were productive and therapeutic. They were cut short, unfortunately, when it became clear that Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) malevolent regime was preparing to incite war in Europe.

After the war, Paul and Mary established the Bollingen Foundation, named for Bollingen Tower, Jung’s home in Bollingen, Switzerland. The Bollingen Foundation was initially dedicated to Jung’s lifelong work and research, and during the twentieth century, it published scholarly publications about art, history, and psychology. In the late

92 1960s, the publications of the Bollingen Foundation were taken over by Princeton University Press.

In the summer of 1941, Paul joined the army and having requested a position in the cavalry, was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas. There, he became an instructor, attended Officers’ Candidate School, and in 1942, was commissioned a second lieutenant. In 1944, he secured a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services (oss, the forerunner of the cia) and served during the Second World War in England, Belgium, and France. He was promoted to major in 1945.

On his discharge from the army in 1945, Paul Mellon returned to his country farm, Rokeby, where he passionately pursued his interests in foxhunting, horse breeding, racing, and trail riding. He also began, once again, to acquire rare books and works of art for his personal collections. Tragically, though, Mary Mellon died in 1946 from a severe asthma attack, leaving the young widower to raise two small children on his own.

In May 1948, Paul married Rachel Lambert Lloyd (1910–2014), also known as “Bunny.” Her family had founded Lambert Pharmacal Company, inventors of the mouthwash Listerine. In 1952, Paul and Bunny’s combined families, the Mellons and the Lloyds, moved out of the Brick House and into a smaller, less formal residence—Oak Spring—which had been designed and built by the architect H. Page Cross (1910–1975) under Bunny’s discerning eye. They also acquired further land, increasing the Rokeby estate to four thousand acres, and purchased homes in Antigua, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, DC.

Together, Paul and Bunny developed and improved the Rokeby Farm estate, building fourteen greenhouses, a dairy, storage for apples, and a stunning library to house Bunny’s horticultural and botanical books. Paul also built several state-of-the-art stables and barns for his horses and cattle, and a private landing strip for the couple’s personal plane.

“Shortly after we were married in 1948,” recalled Paul in his autobiography, “Bunny and I started visiting art dealers in New York and Paris. Bunny had always been interested in French history and in French 19th-century paintings, partly inspired by her lifetime love of gardens and landscape gardening. It is impossible to describe the influence of visual objects in relation to my habits of collecting without saying how much Bunny’s imagination and visual acuity have influenced me.” 5

Of all their homes, Paul and Bunny favored Oak Spring at Rokeby. They enjoyed seeing the stallions, mares, and foals frolicking in the fields with the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. Bunny’s gardens, regardless of the season, always stood out as horticultural works of art that blended beautifully with the Virginia countryside. It was here, too, that Paul found a landscape reminiscent of his beloved England.

The newly built home at Oak Spring was also just a short walk from the Brick House, which was soon converted to a museum to accommodate Paul’s sporting art collection. His library included many enchanting manuscripts and rare books, particularly Americana and Virginiana, as well as historic maps and important atlases. Paul purchased the book collections of Major John Roland Abbey (1894–1969) and John Locke (1632–1704), wax sculptures by Edgar Degas (1834–1917), and sculptures by Herbert Haseltine (1877–1962) and John Skeaping (1901–1980). The museum was appointed with beautiful furniture and decorative objects, including all the trophies and silver that came from the success of Paul’s thoroughbreds and racehorses.

With the help of two advisers and friends, Basil Taylor (1922–1975) and John Baskett (b. 1931), Paul acquired a vast amount of British art. In 1963, a seminal exhibition containing 324 paintings and 127 drawings

Paul Mellon’s book collection with sculptures by Herbert Haseltine and John Skeaping, Abbey Room, Brick House, ca. 1970s. Photograph by Steven Tucker, New York.

Paul Mellon’s Americana collection, Pine Library, Brick House, ca. 1970s. Photograph by Steven Tucker, New York. View of Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81, wax), in the Edgar Degas Room, from the second-floor hallway of Brick House, ca. 1970s. Photograph by Steven Tucker, New York.

94 from his collection was shown at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The exhibition was a huge success and renewed interest in British art as an important genre, with appeal to both American and European scholars. The exhibition was also shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and brought back to the United States for its final venue at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1985, Paul and Bunny helped to build a new wing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, doubling its size. They bequeathed more than 1,800 works of art to the museum, which transformed its collection of English, French, and American paintings and sculpture. Paul served as a trustee of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for forty-six years.

Throughout the 1960s, Paul devoted considerable time and funds to help establish the Yale Center for British Art. He consulted with and recruited noted architect Louis Isidore Kahn (1901–1974) to design a building that could display all of the paintings and other objects he had personally collected. Kahn’s iconic building was completed and opened to the public in 1977. Today, the art collection at the Yale Center for British Art is one of the largest outside of Great Britain. With steadfast support from Paul Mellon and his estate, as well as help from other donors, the collection now contains over 135,000 objects.

In 1967, Paul and his sister, Ailsa, donated funds for the construction of the new East Building of the National Gallery of Art. The new wing’s location was on an adjacent site that had been set aside by Congress in 1937, when the National Gallery of Art was first established. Right at the outset, Andrew Mellon had felt there should be space for expansion. I. M. Pei (1917–2019), already known to Paul, was selected to design the new building in a modernist style. Construction began in 1971 and the East Building was completed in 1978. During the 1980s and 1990s, Paul and Bunny contributed an additional 1,100 works to the National Gallery of Art, many by well-known French, English, and American artists.

In 1969, Paul and Ailsa established a nonprofit foundation in honor of their father, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, formed by the consolidation of the Avalon Foundation (created by Ailsa) and the Old Dominion Foundation (created by Paul). Today, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation continues its significant support of scholarship and education with a particular focus in the arts and humanities.

During the next two decades, Paul’s horse breeding operation at Rokeby produced several very successful thoroughbred racehorses, including:

Arts and Letters, a beautiful chestnut thoroughbred that had several important victories in 1969 and 1970. Arts and Letters was “Horse of the Year” in 1969 and was inducted into the United States National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1994.

Fort Marcy was a bay thoroughbred that racked up major wins from 1967 to 1969. He was named “Horse of the Year” in 1970 and voted into the United States National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.

Mill Reef was one of Paul Mellon’s most successful champion bay thoroughbreds. Bred at Rokeby, Mill Reef was trained exclusively in England, where he won several important European races from 1970 to 1972. He was voted “European Horse of the Year” in 1971.

Quadrangle, a bay thoroughbred, achieved several major victories in 1963, and also won the Belmont Stakes in 1964.

In 1970, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art was founded in London by a grant from Paul himself. Presently housing a collection of roughly twenty-six thousand volumes on British architecture and art, the Centre works closely with the Yale Center for British Art. Together, the two entities work with Yale University Press to publish scholarly works, as well as hosting workshops and conferences relating to the arts of Great Britain.

From 1959 to 1979, Paul enjoyed competing in the 100 Mile Trail Ride in Hot Springs, Virginia. He participated seventeen times, winning on five occasions. The last three years—1977, 1978, and 1979—he won with a beautiful gray and white retired steeplechaser named Christmas Goose.

In addition to his love of art, Paul Mellon was an avid conservationist. Through some of the foundations that he and his family established, Paul saved from destructive development large areas of ocean frontage at Cape Hatteras, Cape Cod, and Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. A grant from one of Paul Mellon’s charitable foundations was also responsible for the renovation of Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, which is directly across the street from the White House. With the help of the National Park Service, several buildings near the park were also refurbished, sidewalks were repaved in brick, new landscaping was introduced, and two fountains were constructed.

In 1975, Paul acquired more than 1,100 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Paris, Virginia, again preventing development from overtaking some of the region’s most bucolic views. This land, given to the Commonwealth of Virginia, ultimately became Sky Meadows State Park. Sixteen years later, Paul purchased another 248 acres for the park and placed his beloved Rokeby in permanent land easements with the help of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. He encouraged many friends and neighbors to do the same, thereby helping conserve crucial open space in this exceptional part of the Virginia Piedmont. Today, Fauquier County has well-developed protections in place against excessive development, and this conservation practice has been applied in other counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia. “Of all my philanthropic endeavors during my lifetime,” Paul wrote in his memoir, “I think I can safely say that the saving of these beautiful natural areas has given me the profoundest pleasure and the most heart-warming satisfaction.” 6

From 1978 to 1981, Paul Mellon commissioned four discursive catalogs about his sporting paintings, drawings, prints, and books. They were published by the Tate Gallery in London for the Yale Center for British Art. During the 1980s, Paul also began to think about writing his personal memoir, and with the help of his close friend and adviser John Baskett, he published his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, in 1992.

During the final years of his life, Paul continued to collect British art, but he decided to step down from several of his museum affiliations. Nevertheless, he remained in contact with those museums with which he was most closely associated: the Yale Center for British Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. He also began to downsize his horse racing and breeding ventures—but in 1993, his bay thoroughbred Sea Hero won the Kentucky Derby, a wonderful high point in Paul’s life.

In February of 1999, Paul died at his home in Oak Spring. In his memoir, he described himself this way: “I have been an amateur in every phase of my life; an amateur poet, an amateur scholar, an amateur horseman…an amateur museum executive. The root of the word

96 ‘amateur’ is the Latin word for love, and I can honestly say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the roles I played.” 7

To all who knew this humble and highly sophisticated man, he was far from being an amateur. Throughout his long life, Paul Mellon received several honorary degrees and awards for his dedication and philanthropic support to many important causes. These gifts live on as a legacy that inspires others to pursue their own scholarship, interests, and talents, thereby expanding sapientia et doctrina, wisdom and knowledge. notes

1. Paul Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon: A Memoir (New York, 1992), 144–45.

2. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 298.

3. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 299.

4. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 299.

5. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 270.

6. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 375.

7. Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 391–92.

Bunny Mellon, Herb tree in a pot, 1969, watercolor on paper. This thank you note reads: “Darling Paul—This is the original sketch from which all the other cards were taken—Thank you for such a pretty farm & letting me have my garden party. All my love— Bunny.” Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA. Paul and Bunny Mellon at the Thanksgiving Day Hunt, Oak Spring, ca. 1988, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, VA.