Mellon

Mellon

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trying to figure out if, after you die, you go to Pittsburgh because you’ve been bad or good.

When asked why he didn’t pursue business or politics, Mellon is disarmingly honest.

“I didn’t feel my mind was geared to that kind of thinking or that kind of life. I haven’t anything against banking and business, but it just bored me,” he says.

A little dog gallops into the room. That’s Patrick, JJellon’s Norwich terrier. Up and out! When we go on to Brick House, Patrick rides in the blue Subaru station wagon with us.

The Brick House is a beautifully-proportioned, Georgian-inspired structure that Mellon lived in with h» first wife, the late Mary Conover, from 1941 to 1946. J In 1961 he converted it into a private museum housing his staggering collection of British and French sporting art and books, including paintings by George Stubbs (English, 1724-1806) and the original wrax sculptures of Edgar Degas. Z “That was the first picture I bought,” he said, panting to a Stubbs’ painting “Pumpkin with a StAble Lpd” on the wall of the Brick House.

“Lovely painting, and it’s in remarkably good state, considering it’s on panel,” he says.

Mellon bought the work in 1936, and he continued to purchase so many Stubbs that no one in the world has more.

Mellon said he started collecting in England after graduating from Cambridge’s Clare College in 1931 (he also attended the Choate School and Yale University).

“For a long time, oh, 15 years. I bought sporting pictures along with all the other (English and French paintings). When we decided to build the center for British Art at Yale, I gave away a lot of my paintings then—probably 90 percent. But then I kept all the rest of the sporting pictures, and they are what are over at tie Brick House now and a few in here,” he said.

The thousands of pictures he has bought since that Jtqne can hardly be counted, scattered as they are between the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery urWashington, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Virginia Museum in Richmond. All, fogwever. are catalogued in volumes sitting on his libmry shelf. * The pictures left at the Brick House, though, truly SStound; there’s Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767-1849), Whose straightforward horse paintings are like a Swiss Version of Stubbs’ original and searching portraits; tainting scenes by Henry Thomas Aiken (1785-1851), racing matches by John Frederick Herring (1795-1865), stallions by James Ward (1769-1859), and many, many others.

Mellon knows them all. Pointing to Ben Marshall’s “Richard Prince, with Damon, the Late Colonel Mellish’s Pointer,” Mellon says, “He belonged to a man named Prince who was the training groom of a Col. Mellish, who owned the dog.”

He explains that Tate curator Judy Edgerton recognized the dog in an 1825 sporting magazine, and from there they unravelled the painting’s date and identified both the dog and the man.

It’s Stubbs, however, for whom Mellon holds a soft spot. “I think Stubbs is not only a great sporting artist but a great artist in his own right. I think if you left the horses out of his pictures, that his landscapes are as worthy as Gainsborough or Wilson or any of the great landscape painters. And he was even a very good portrait painter,” he said. , v The fact that Stubbs paints horses is no small part of Mellon’s appreciation of him. When asked about his own hunters, Mellon jumps up and snatches a photograph from the wall. , , “That’s a horse called Dublin. He was given to me by my mother here in Virginia when I came back from Cambridge. And he was really an absolutely perfect hunter. He was a wonderful jumper, though he did pull hadly,” he says.