Mellon the magpie collector

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5 April 2012

Paul Mellon, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1907, was the only son of a banker, Andrew Mellon, in his day one of the three richest men in America. Even taking into account the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash of 1929 - of which the collapse of all European economies, appalling unemployment and political extremism were for years the consequences - the Mellons remained rich, and both before and after the Second World War there was money to spare for paintings.

Andrew Mellon collected Old Masters that, after his death in 1937, formed the core collection of the National Gallery in Washington, of which the foundation and gift to the nation had long been his ambition; Paul, however, sensing no obligation to follow in his father's footsteps, collected in the then neglected field of British art. By the time of his death in 1999 he had his own Foundation, The Yale Center for British Art, with some 2,000 paintings, 50,000 drawings and prints, 35,000 books and some hundreds of sculptures. It is from these that a small selection is now on view at the Royal Academy to give us the flavour of his legacy.

In one of the too many introductory essays in the monumental supporting catalogue, one writer, recording an event in 1959, opines that British art was then "needlessly neglected and undervalued", with the implication that Mellon's avid buying brought it to the fore. I was then working at Christie's and there is no doubt that it had an invigorating effect on prices and we (and Sotheby's) gave him advance warning of any British pictures of the highest quality that came to us for sale; but to attribute to Mellon's influence the increasing weight of scholarship in this backwater of art's history is a profound error - that was simply and solely the achievement of the Courtauld Institute and its associated academics.

Until the Depression the history of British art had been wretchedly served by amateurs; fusspots and old ladies of both sexes had written innumerable meretricious tomes on favourite artists, the extravagance of their often beautiful production seeming to lend authority to unreliable chatty nonsense utterly devoid of academic rigour. Early in the 1930s only one true scholar, Ellis Waterhouse, an assistant at the National Gallery and Mellon's immediate contemporary, began to apply to British art the disciplines that European art historians had employed with Renaissance art for fully a century, and by the outbreak of war in 1939 others had begun to follow him.

When the newly fledged Courtauld Institute re-opened after the war, the syllabus included a whole year of detailed study of English art before or after 1500 and bred a generation of enthusiastic young scholars who, because of the extreme difficulty of pursuing scholarship in Europe in the austere postwar years, turned to British art for subjects that might be suitable for theses and higher degrees. It was the Institute's insistence on giving as much time to English art as to the Italian Renaissance that really fostered interest in Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence, Etty, Danby and the whole field of British art; Waterhouse taught and lectured there, and no tutor did more to encourage enthusiasm for the minor masters of English art than Michael Kitson who, in 1985, became for seven years director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at 20 Bloomsbury Square.

If Mellon was not entirely responsible for the nation's interest in British art, it must at least be accepted that he has done as much for it as the impoverished and beleaguered Tate, the state's utterly penniless guardian of historic British art until 1946, when the government gave it £2,000 a year for purchases (it has been as hopelessly underfunded ever since). I am in no position to compare and contrast the two collections, but I dare say that within his limited field - that is up to the mid-19th century - the Mellon Foundation may have the larger holding; nor, since I've not been to America since 1979, can I opine as to which is the better. From the selection at the Royal Academy, it seems that the Mellon is as haphazard as the Tate, but that may well be the fault of selectors determined to demonstrate range and scholarship rather than give us the simple enjoyment of great quality. I am perturbed by the inclusion in the exhibition of too many works that to me seem unremarkable; one of Mellon's old friends almost wept at the private view so upset was he by the wretchedness of the selection.

Gainsborough, for example, is poorly represented with a late hack and habitual drawing of an ideal landscape, a disappointingly bland and syrupy Landscape with Cattle, and a boiled beef portrait of The Gravenor Family that wholly justifies the old adage that Suffolk is the county of ugly women. None of these is good enough to stand alone and only in the context of other Gainsboroughs is their ownership justified. Why, if a man is Croesus rich, should he buy a dully conventional watercolour by Thomas Jones so finicky that it could be by one of a hundred amateurs, when he could have bought a dozen truly remarkable oil sketches? Why a portrait by Lawrence of a young man of whom the painter was evidently more than ordinarily fond, George James Welbore Agar-Ellis, but who, pace the sitter's contemporary account, must have left the painting of the mismatched body to an assistant who could not relate it to the head in proportion, attitude or stance - I could not live with such a dog's dinner of a picture.

Why the eight-foot portrait by Robert Burnard of John Gubbins Newton and his Sister Mary, children both, uneasy with a pony, stiff as wooden dolls, an inn-sign primitive by a man who ended his days as a house-painter and paper-hanger in Adelaide, Australia? In this last case we know the answer - it is because when it was acquired, the expert adviser, recognising "the mesmeric force" of "the Swiss tradition", attributed it to Agasse, a Swiss painter who settled in England in 1800. It now comes under the heading of "engaging curiosities" of which there are others in the exhibition - an impressive mountain landscape by George Fennel Robson, a wintry village by Robert Hills vaguely reminiscent of Breughel, a mock Triumph of Music by Edward Burney and the back of James Jefferys's head as a self-portrait - yes, yes, yes, we get the joke, but the drawing itself is feeble.

Of all the oddities the most charming and long-lasting must be Benjamin West's intimate portrayal of his family - his ancient father and elder brother a pair of doomladen Quakers, his wife Betsy nursing their second son, their first standing by the window, West himself a silvery presence standing on the right in the act of painting them; in crazed enthusiasm this simple composition has been interpreted as a secular Adoration of the Kings.

Of the great grandees of British art, Reynolds, Stubbs and Turner are represented best. One portrait only, and that a mere half-length, stands for the first President of the RA - of Mrs Abington, an actress; enchanting in the casual immediacy of the pose, seen through the back of a Hepplewhite chair, she shares its seat with a small and shaggy dog, Reynolds demonstrating in its coat and her lace paint and brushwork of which neither Titian nor Vel·zquez would have been ashamed.

It is now interpreted as risqué and indecorous, but the gesture of thumb to bottom lip suggests to me only the indrawn breath of sudden thought. Of Stubbs we have Pumpkin with a Stable Lad, Mellon's very first purchase, a perfectly ordinary Stubbs but for the lad and judicious compositional imbalance; the little lad of eight or nine, fearful and tentative in his approach to the horse, is crammed into a corner of the canvas - setting him so, and positioning the horse to the right of centre, close to him, lends surprising tension to their greeting.

The other surprise is The Zebra, a mare in Queen Charlotte's menagerie, almost certainly painted as a labour of love and curiosity, for the canvas remained in his studio until Stubbs's death. She is painted well enough to be recognised now as the smallest of three sub-species of zebra. In light that is ingenious and dramatic she stands, unusually for Stubbs deprived of horizon and sky, in a dense glade quite differently conceived from the trees in his paintings of horses, dense enough to suggest that in ignorance of African species Stubbs conjured from English trees some semblance of a forest perhaps described to him by a traveller.

In passing, James Ward's Eagle is a post-Stubbs horse portrait of a different stamp, but of international romantic mastery enough to match the horses of Delacroix.

As for Turner, Mellon covers most of his conventions conventionally, but the kinship of his Staffa, Fingal's Cave, an oil of 1832, and his watercolour of A Paddle-Steamer in a Storm of c1840 is intriguing. The oil was painted two years after Mendelssohn composed his Overture and in the same year as its revision - the mood of the one reflects the other so closely that I wonder if Turner had heard it. On the left there is a mystical blaze of white and yellow light that has nothing to do with the sun sinking to the horizon on the distant right, and reading the picture from the left (as most of us do) this seems a deliberate ploy to make us understand that Staffa was to Turner a place of ineffable and inexplicable marvels.

The steamer's funnel leaves a dark trail of smoke that disperses in this white light, and this same motif in the watercolour invites the comparison - here with lightning and a thundercloud against the sun, rain pouring from it or drawing water-spouts, the steamer safely out of reach but its trailing smoke leading our eyes into it. The watercolour is as limpid as the oil is dense.

Turner's eight-footer of Dordrecht is worth contemplation too. In a sense it may pay homage to Dutch painters of the 17th century, but it also looks forward to generations of painters for whom the serene harbour was an ideal subject - a subject now so familiar and ordinary that we risk walking past with eyes unseeing this great chromatic exercise so bright that "it almost puts your eyes out", as one contemporary viewer put it.

Among the many dull things and pretty trifles (how the selectors must have despised potential visitors) there is one last masterpiece - Joseph Wright's Academy by Lamplight. Painted c1768, the year of the Royal Academy's foundation, Wright himself not a founder member, disappointment has never been so eloquently and elegantly expressed. We should look at this painting from the right ( counterintuitive) where we are in direct communication with the peeping youngest of the students; stationed so, we make sense of the back of the chair on which the drawing student sits - we are, as it were, reaching to rest a hand on it as we peer over his shoulder.

This is Wright's characteristic invitation to the spectator to break through the picture plane and be present within the pictorial space; thus the Caravaggiesque light, the clutter and the young protagonists all fall into place. It is reality in the sense that students in that day were instructed to draw by lamp or candlelight; it is ideal in that the students are intensely engaged in the beauty of their subject with no hint of the crude sexual response of which there is so much evidence in the 18th century; and it is mythical in that it evokes the tale of Pygmalion, the sculptor of antiquity whose figure of Galatea came to life - just as does this sculpture warmed and coloured by the light.

It is the most seriously beautiful picture in the exhibition. The exhibition is crowded, suggesting an audience more enthusiastic for ancestral forms of art than are the handful of visitors for Baselitz in the main room downstairs; this proves a grave misjudgment by the worthies of the RA who organise these things. My own instinct would have been to put the Antiquaries show in the beastly Sackler rooms, scrap the tediously repetitive Baselitz retrospective or put it in the disused Museum of Mankind, and devote the whole of the Academy's main exhibition space to a blockbuster of Paul Mellon's pictures - then we might really have the measure of the collection and the man.

Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art is at the Royal Academy (020 7300 8000) until 27 January. Daily 10am-6pm (Friday until 10pm). Admission £8, concessions available. www.royal academy. org.uk

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