ANY NUMBER OF special issues of this Magazine might have been planned to celebrate the achievements of Paul Mellon, each with a different, if sometimes overlapping, theme. As a collector, Mellon’s enthusiasms encompassed French nineteenth-century painting (and Degas’s sculpture), William Blake, the relations between British art and painting on the Continent, sporting art, books and eighteenth-century British landscape painting. Apart from his collecting, assessments of his contributions to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, the building of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the establishment in London of the Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art might all have furnished a group of articles on Mellon as patron and benefactor. Instead we have concentrated in this issue on the range of Mellon’s taste in British art. English landscape is represented by Charles Beddington’s reattribution of a painting of Warwick Castle (Yale Center) and by Philip McEvansoneya’s discovery of an unpublished letter of John Constable. The English horse – the working nag of the London streets rather than the glossy hunter more familiar to Mellon – is seen through Robert Bevan’s Post-Impressionist eye in Robert Upstone’s article on a work by an artist Mellon admired and collected. Frances Spalding’s study of the uneasy friendship between John Piper and Ben Nicholson reminds us that Mellon collected works by thelatter as well as by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

It is often presumed that Mellon’s feeling for British painting stopped with Constable and Turner; it did, but then it raced several furlongs ahead until it reached the early twentieth century. As Hugh Belsey remarks in his review of the Paul Mellon centenary exhibition recently at New Havenand opening this month at the Royal Academy of Arts inLondon (pp.714–16), it is perhaps to be regretted that this aspect of his collecting is unrepresented in the exhibition. He derived pleasure from a good deal of early twentieth-century art just as he wholehearedly supported the two exceptional modern architects I.M. Pei and Louis Khan involved in, respectively, the extension to the National Gallery of Artand the building of the Yale Center.

Mellon’s memoir, Reflections in a Silver Spoon (1992), falls into two parts, the break provided by the death in 1937 ofhis father, Andrew (whose biography by David Cannadine is reviewed by Celina Fox on pp.704–05). The early pressures on Mellon to conform to his father’s rampant capitalism and only intermittently selfless philanthropy produced a divided and somewhat reluctant heir to this cataract of wealth. Atug-of-war ensued between private aspirations and public commitments. Mellon did not want power or grave responsibilities; instead, he saw a way forwards by translating his personal tastes into public benefaction on an immense scale. He became the most professional of amateurs, bringing vision, foresight, discrimination and humour to all he touched. As a ‘galloping Anglophile’ (his own phrase) from his earliest years, it was only a matter of time before thecollecting instinct, in his blood, turned towards British art. The catalyst was the English art historian and writer Basil Taylor whose celebrated meeting with Mellon in 1959was decisive. The floodgates opened and within four or five years Mellon had amassed the profusion of mostly eighteenth-century paintings and works on paper that formsthe basis of the Yale Center’s collections and the foundation for its continuing scholarship and research. He and his advisers were not afraid of the modest and the unexpected, works that lend a domestic individuality to what might have become a too august institutional collection of frontrunners.

When in 1936 Mellon bought his first British painting, Stubbs’s Pumpkin with a stable-lad, Stubbs’s critical fortunes and visibility were low. Mellon’s passion for this artist, later harnessed to Basil Taylor’s enthusiasm, led to the complete revival of Stubbs’s critical reputation, transforming himfrom ‘Horse painter’ to great British artist. The scholarmost intimately associated with this reversal is Judy Egerton, whose devotion to British art and especially to Stubbs is crowned this month with the publication of her catalogue raisonné of Stubbs’s work. In her article in this issue, she looks at the human beings in Stubbs’s paintings, particularly the walk-on parts that have an engrossing appeal for those marginally bored by the equine leading roles. Egerton’s crisp, often amusing style and profound scholarship mark her latest book and all her earlier writings. Paul Mellon, if alive today, would surely have had an advance copy flown out to himto salute once more the thoroughbred he had backed all those years before.