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Arundel Newspapers Staff Photo/Scott Ferrell Paul Mellon with Degas figurines.
Mullen, was English-born. She moved to Rokeby in 1931 after she divorced Paul’s father.
1 Near Mellon’s mother hangs an exquisite and rare Stubbs landscape of a bam; underneath is a Degas of a recalcitrant racehorse. To the left are four perfect James Seymour drawings (English, 1702-1752): magnificent, wide-eyed race horses being led away by their grooms.
Mellon’s manner of collecting is awe-inspiring. You know he buys only what is good, that he marvels at the vortexes and swirls of paint in a Munnings, and that he’s moved by Degas’ perfect placement of a line.
Mellon is as eager to share snippets about his life as he is to share his art. He tells about a near-miss the priceless Degas wax figurines underwent not long ago when the Halon gas system (a fire-extinguishing system), which still had some bugs in it, met with the thenglass but now-plastic ceiling.
“In case of fire these doors would close, and gas would come down from these places in the comers. Well, one day a thermostat was set wrong in this room, and someone left the lights on too long and they set off the alarm.
“The doors closed, and the trouble was the gas comes down from the bottom and then it goes up. When it got up to the top, the glass was red-hot, and the whole thing broke into thousands of pieces and came falling down,” he says.
“The miraculous thing is that it never touched any of the statues. You would have thought it could have easily cut off that girl’s arm or her leg. We were really very lucky. So now we have plastic in the ceiling instead.”
Mellon has just finished, with the help of author John Baskett, an autobiography of his life, starting with his Pittsburgh origins. Mellon’s grandfather, Thomas Mellon, was a judge and a banker, vocations felicitous to developing the Mellon Bank. Thomas’ two sons, Richard and Andrew, continued in his footsteps, shrewdly funding such then-fledging corporations as
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