Elizabeth Goldring: At the YCBA

Elizabeth Goldring

‘Pumpkin with a Stable Lad’ by George Stubbs (1774).

The Yale Centre for British Art, which reopened in the spring of 2025 after being closed for two years (as part of a renovation project costing $16.5 million), is home to the largest collection of British art outside the UK. Its holdings, which span the 15th century to the present day, include around 2500 paintings and sculptures, more than 50,000 works on paper and some 20,000 rare books and manuscripts. At the museum’s core is a foundational gift of works from Paul Mellon, who used his banking fortune to breed racehorses and acquire beautiful objects. He also gave Yale the funds to erect a building in which to display his gift. Plans for the YCBA were announced in 1966 and the museum opened to the public in 1977 – though Mellon remained an avid collector of British art in the intervening years and beyond, continuing to donate works to the YCBA on a regular basis until his death in 1999. ‘As anyone who has started to collect anything knows,’ he wrote, ‘it is impossible to stop.’

Mellon’s first love was the long 18th century: the period bookended by the birth of William Hogarth, in 1697, and the death of J.M.W. Turner, in 1851. A keen horseman from childhood, Mellon had a particular enthusiasm for landscapes, equestrian art and depictions of traditional countryside pursuits. It is no surprise that works by George Stubbs, the most celebrated equestrian painter of the 18th century, were among his favourite possessions. But Mellon cast a wide net. He collected works from the 16th century, such as a portrait miniature of c.1530 believed, when he bought it, to be by Hans Holbein the Younger (though it is now ascribed to Jean Clouet, court painter to Francis I). And he was a great admirer of several 20th-century painters and sculptors, including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John, Ben Nicholson and John Skeaping.

‘Lady Mary Boyle Nursing Her Son Charles’ by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1690).

Roughly two-thirds of the YCBA’s current holdings once belonged to Mellon himself, with the remainder comprising items purchased by the museum or bequeathed to it. What began as a personal project has evolved over time into a multifaceted institution, reflecting not just Mellon’s taste, but also that of generations of curators and museum directors. Recent acquisitions range from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s extraordinary portrait of Lady Mary Boyle and her son Charles (1690) – believed to be the earliest British depiction of a mother breastfeeding her child – to Cecily Brown’s The Hound with the Horses’ Hooves (2019), an enormous abstract painting which depicts, from a lowered perspective and with an almost palpable sense of energy and movement, the blurred forms of a hound and a horse crashing through woodland at speed.

Born in Pittsburgh on 11 June 1907, Mellon shared a birthday with John Constable, whose works he would later collect. His father, the financier and politician Andrew Mellon, was one of the richest men in America as well as a great philanthropist and collector. In 1937, Mellon père founded the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC with a gift of 126 Old Master paintings and 26 sculptures (including works by Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Veronese, Van Eyck, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Vermeer), together with the funds to construct a suitably grand building in which to display them. Paul’s mother, Nora McMullen, was English; Andrew was introduced to her in 1898 on one of his picture-buying expeditions to London with his childhood friend, and fellow Pennsylvanian, Henry Clay Frick.

As an infant, Paul Mellon was christened in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle: a ‘singular privilege’, as he noted in his memoir, Reflections in a Silver Spoon (1992), which seemed to foreshadow ‘my later addiction to English life and English places’. Throughout his childhood, he spent time with aunts, uncles, cousins and other extended family in England, even after his parents’ acrimonious divorce in 1912. There were visits, too, as a child to the Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue for tea. His father’s Old Masters – ‘always around me in my childhood’ – also left an imprint: ‘I am sure I absorbed a fondness for them and an appreciation of them by a sort of mental osmosis.’

As a shy student at Choate, then an all-male boarding school, Mellon found refuge in the study of English literature and history, interests he pursued as an undergraduate at Yale. On completing his studies, he found himself at a crossroads:

I wanted to do something useful … I also knew that my father would dearly like me to make a career in the Mellon Bank and in overseeing investments in various industries. I didn’t want to disappoint him but realised that I had no aptitude for banking and suspected that I would be everlastingly bored by the business world.

In the end, he decided to continue his studies at Clare College, Cambridge. The experience was not an altogether happy one. But Mellon’s time at Cambridge, during which he threw himself into rowing and discovered fox-hunting, deepened his love of the English landscape and traditional countryside pursuits. His father’s appointment as ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1932 provided yet another point of connection to – and a further excuse for visiting – England.

In 1936 Mellon bought his first painting, Stubbs’s Pumpkin with a Stable Lad (1774), from Knoedler’s. Currently displayed in the YCBA’s long gallery alongside other 18th-century works from Mellon’s own collection (which is hung, in the 18th-century manner, from floor to ceiling), the painting depicts the celebrated chestnut being fed by a stable boy. As Mellon later recalled, it was love at first sight and he immediately agreed to the $5000 asking price. The painting remained a favourite throughout his life.

Mellon did not begin collecting in earnest until after the Second World War, which he spent working in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. With his second wife, Rachel Lowe Lambert (known as Bunny), whom he married in 1948, Mellon started buying French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bunny guided his interest in French art and landscape gardening (in 1962, she was asked by Jacqueline Kennedy to redesign the White House Rose Garden). The Mellons soon amassed a spectacular collection of 19th and early 20th-century paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Manet, Cézanne and Renoir, among others (now, in the main, in the possession of the National Gallery in Washington).

Only in 1959 did Mellon begin to focus on British art. In that year, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond – located around a hundred miles from Oak Spring, the Mellons’ farm in Virginia hunting country – began putting together an exhibition of sporting paintings. Mellon’s help was sought, both as a potential lender and as someone who might be able to persuade other private collectors to lend works. Sport and the Horse, which opened in 1960, reignited Mellon’s Anglophilia and his passion for Stubbs’s work. It also brought him into contact with Basil Taylor, an English art historian who – though based at the Royal College of Art in London – advised on the exhibition. Soon, Taylor was helping Mellon to collect British art.

Taylor shared Mellon’s love of Stubbs. But his interest in, and knowledge of, British art was unusually broad. During the fifteen years or so that he spent advising Mellon, he was engaged, on and off, in work on a wildly ambitious, but ultimately doomed, biographical dictionary of British painters in Great Britain and Ireland, between 1530 and 1950. Had it been realised, Taylor’s ‘Biographical Dictionary’ would have consisted of entries for some fifty thousand painters spread across fifteen volumes, with each volume running to about 750 pages.

Perhaps influenced by this project, Mellon seems to have sought to create something equally encyclopedic in his collection of British art. He systematically sought out works from all periods in an effort to ensure that there were no lacunae in his holdings. He may not have lived with his Elizabethan paintings in the same way that he lived with works by Stubbs or John or Nicholson, but he clearly thought it essential that his collection – and, in due course, the YCBA’s – should include examples by the leading painters at Elizabeth I’s court. Mellon was alert, too, to the latest scholarly findings. His paintings by William Larkin depicting two gentlemen of the Jacobean court c.1615 (now known to be William Pope, 1st Earl of Downe and Gray Brydges, 5th Baron Chandos) were purchased at a time when, thanks to the pioneering researches of James Lees-Milne and Roy Strong, Larkin’s identity had only recently been established.

How was Mellon able to assemble such a large and comprehensive collection so quickly? It was a feat made possible, in part, by the dramatic decline of the traditional English country house in the decades after the Second World War. Crippling inheritance taxes and maintenance costs, among other factors, meant that the London art market was flooded with traditional British paintings and other works of art. Mellon continued to make trips to England, though much of his business was conducted by post. In Reflections in a Silver Spoon, he recalls the ‘intense pleasure’ he derived in the early 1960s, as his collection was getting off the ground, from the near-daily stream of letters ‘typed on airmail blue paper’ he received from Taylor, assorted art dealers and others. Sometimes, black and white photographs or colour transparencies were enclosed. On one occasion Mellon had to form an initial impression of a possible Stubbs from a ‘very badly light-flashed Polaroid’.

Unlike the Frick in New York or the Huntington in San Marino, California, which showcase the collections amassed by Americans of an earlier generation in their own Beaux-Arts mansions, the YCBA has always been housed in a structure purpose-built as a museum. Often described as a ‘modernist icon’, it was the last building designed by Louis Kahn, the Estonian-born Jewish American architect who believed that the raw materials of every project had a sense of their own destiny. ‘You say to brick, “What do you want, brick?”’ Kahn liked to say to aspiring architects. Kahn began drawing up plans for the YCBA in the late 1960s, in close consultation with Mellon – though his sudden death from a heart attack, in 1974, meant that he never saw the building that resulted from his designs.

The recent renovation of the YCBA has not made fundamental alterations to Kahn’s aesthetic. Rather, the emphasis has been on conserving and future-proofing the building. Worn materials have been replaced, taking advantage of advances in technology. The museum’s austere, grid-like façade of matte steel and opaque, reflective glass still gives way to serene, open-plan galleries of concrete, travertine stone and pale oak. But tired carpets have been replaced and new Belgian linen applied to the walls, while sun-bleached windowsills and shutters have been refinished and refurbished.

As has always been the case, two vertical courtyard voids – one running the whole of the building’s height, the other spanning three of its four storeys – create unexpected and visually arresting sight lines, allowing paintings and sculptures of different centuries displayed in galleries on different floors to be juxtaposed. Moveable partition walls, which can be added or subtracted as required, allow the display spaces to be configured in a number of ways: a clever decision on Kahn’s part given that the YCBA’s holdings were never intended to be – and have never been – static.

With the exception of the galleries devoted to works on paper, which were designed by Kahn to be light-locked for conservation reasons, the museum is notable for its use of natural light: there are more than two hundred skylights, whose light is diffused by the building’s two vertical voids. Most of its galleries are bathed in a warm glow on sunny days – and, having been a regular visitor to the YCBA when I was a student at Yale in the 1990s, I can attest that, even on an overcast day, there is a surprisingly large amount of natural light.

The YCBA will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2027. To mark the occasion, it is mounting two special exhibitions which, together, nod to the chronological span of its (and Mellon’s own) holdings. One will be devoted to Tudor and Jacobean art, the other to the works of Gwen John.

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