Not surprisingly, there are few happy snaps in the Mellon family album. One,
taken in 1913, after the divorce, shows three uneasy people. Andrew seems
tired and haggard, Ailsa cross and Paul withdrawn. It looks as though the
pensive Paul, just six, is already spending large amounts of time in his
head. By this time Andrew was 55 and he must have thought he had got through
the hardest period of his life. But his suffering was not yet over. The next
few years saw him entering politics, going to Washington to serve as
treasury secretary in the Republican governments of Warren Harding, Calvin
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. His work ethic, coupled with a determination to
balance the government books, won him respect but no allies. Always
unbending and never eager to charm, it was said of the taciturn Andrew that
“three presidents served under him”.
Andrew was treasury secretary when the Wall Street Crash came in 1929.
Millions of workers were thrown into unemployment and the very foundations
of American capitalism were shaken. His reaction, which would bring him into
later conflict with Roosevelt, was not to provide welfare programmes, but to
create favourable conditions for entrepreneurs. As Cannadine explains, this
stance made him one of the most despised men in America. One story told
against him had him asking for a nickel to phone a friend from a call box.
“Here’s a dime,” replies the man, “phone both of them.” There was so much
bad feeling towards him during the Depression that in his last years he
faced a series of fraud charges which appeared to have been brought out of
spite. Having set up a charitable foundation to bequeath his art collection,
which would later become the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he was
accused of tax evasion. Several trials dragged on for years, though he was
eventually exonerated of all charges after he died.
It was during these travails, however, that Andrew pulled off the deal of all
deals. He had heard that Stalin’s government needed cash and wanted to sell
off some of its heirlooms. After tortured top-secret negotiations, in 1930
and 1931 he bought 21 masterpieces from the Hermitage, including works by
Raphael, Titian, Perugino and Van Eyck, which were smuggled into the US. But
he did not live long to enjoy them. He died in 1937.
Andrew’s death liberated his son, who had grown to manhood shy and solitary,
with an active dislike of commerce. Leaving home to study at Yale and
Cambridge, he kept his distance from his parents. He watched his mother
marry and divorce again but there was to be no great rapprochement with her.
He watched his father grow old and tired and then have to defend his
reputation. He grew to hate Pittsburgh and all it represented as much as his
mother had done and refused to join the family business. A short stint at
the bank convinced him of the futility of that path. Paul’s passion was for
the country, its fresh air and outdoor pursuits, and his wife, whom he
married in 1934, shared that love. It is not too fanciful to suggest that he
regarded filthy Pittsburgh as representing the “dark satanic mills” that
Blake referred to in his poem Jerusalem, and he lost no time at all in
falling in love with England. It exuded, in his own words, “a warm and
friendly glow”. For him, perhaps, England represented a safe haven and
English art, by extension, a refuge. He spent most of the 1930s in Britain
racing and fox-hunting. After his father died, he bought a farm in Virginia
to live the life of a country gentleman. “Hunting is another example of the
reaction which was set up inside me against business, the city, modern
industrial drabness, the suppression of the natural emotions and feelings.”
If proof of his Anglophilia were needed, Paul volunteered to fight immediately
after the outbreak of the second world war and long before the US draft.
Posted to Britain, he qualified as a paratrooper and was seconded to Special
Operations Executive (SOE), where he trained secret agents. He had, as they
say, a good war, reaching the rank of major.
He acquired his first picture, a Stubbs painting of a racehorse, on a visit to
England in the 1930s. He would crisscross the ocean all his life. Art
dealers who had courted his father, such as Charles Duveen, now turned to
him. But the kind of paintings he bought would be totally different. Whereas
Andrew had wanted what Cannadine calls “trophy women”, Paul sought intimate
conversation pieces or pictures that showed psychological depth. “It seems
to me that art makes one feel the essence of something, turning the
ordinary, everyday object or scene into a universal one,” he wrote in his
memoirs.
He was also shrewd enough to understand the Mellon effect on the market. If he
were known to want a certain picture, prices could escalate immediately. “I
am told that on my arrival in the capital, the London dealers’ windows
filled overnight with English pictures,” he said.
Paul’s passion certainly helped put British art in its rightful place, at the
centre of a great European tradition. In this respect, he was before his
time: when he started buying Stubbs and Landseer, for instance, British art
had little kudos. French impressionism was in vogue, and anything else
looked parochial by comparison.During the post-war period the art world was
in the doldrums. It had not yet recovered from the Great Depression, let
alone the second world war. When Britain’s impoverished aristocracy was
selling off the family heirlooms, he snapped up as much as he could. This
was a world of rationing, austerity and supertax, some of which was paid at
90%. Titled people were selling up everywhere, and Mellon travelled up and
down the country meeting dukes and baronets on their uppers. John Baskett,
an art dealer who acted as Paul’s adviser, remembers one Scottish earl
clambering up a rickety ladder to fetch a picture that he wanted Mellon to
see. Baskett asked him why he couldn’t get a servant to do it for him. “Oh
no, I don’t want Perkins [the butler] to know that I’m having to sell,” he
replied.
Like his father’s before him, Paul’s personal life was not to be easy. Shortly
after his return from the war, his wife, Mary, died of an asthma attack,
leaving behind two small children. Two years later he met his second wife,
Rachel Lloyd. It was she who encouraged his interest in psychoanalysis. He
travelled to Zurich to study with Carl Jung and used his money to have
Jung’s works translated into English, thus ensuring him a place on the world
stage alongside Freud.
It does not take the expertise of a Freud or Jung to realise that for Mellon
England represented an ideal. It was a world of tea and buttered toast, of
university quads and hunt meetings on frosty winter mornings. Remembering
his days at Cambridge, he once said he loved “King’s College Chapel and
Choir and candlelight, the coal-fire smell”. He didn’t even mind it getting
dark at 3.30pm in winter. No, England was a song by Delius, a variation by
Elgar, a poem by Rupert Brooke. He loved racing, buying Mill Reef, which won
the Derby in 1971. And how better to preserve this internal landscape than
by buying slices of Britain as fast as he could and putting them on the
wall? He acquired with a missionary zeal. Buying was, perhaps, as important as
the trips to his analyst. His memoirs give us a clue as to what he consulted
him about. “I do not know, and I doubt if anyone will ever know, why Father
was so seemingly devoid of feeling and so tightly contained in his lifeless,
hard shell,” he wrote.
That he never penetrated the lifeless, hard shell was his one abiding sorrow.
But in one respect he did. Father and son met through art, having a
conversation through oils and watercolours that they never had in real life.
Like Andrew, Paul continued philanthropy on a grand scale. He and his
sister, Ailsa, endowed the east wing of Washington’s National Gallery,
designed by
I M Pei, which opened in 1978. But what to do with his own collection? It was
far too big for Washington; a new gallery was called for. The Yale Center
for British Art, endowed by Paul, opened in 1977 in a superb modernist
building by the architect Louis Kahn.
Those who knew Paul Mellon remember him as the least flashy of men. “He was
unspoilt and unostentatious,” remembers his friend Baskett. Cannadine
agrees. “He struggled to create a good and worthwhile life for himself, when
lesser men bearing similar burdens of wealth and expectation might have
given up and gone to ruin,” he says.
Paul Mellon died at the age of 91. He had chosen to be buried in a simple plot
in the family graveyard in Virginia, near to his first wife, his sister,
Ailsa, his mother and his father, whose body he had brought from Pittsburgh
to lie beside him. There in the soil they would achieve a closeness never
realised in life.
An American’s Passion for British Art: Paul Mellon’s Legacy is at the Royal
Academy of Arts, London, until January 27, 2008. Tel: 0870 848 8484; www.royalacademy.org.uk.
Tate Britain, London, is showing British Sporting Art: Works Presented by
Paul Mellon until February 10, 2008;
www.tate.org.uk/britain
