Anglomania

The reputation of English artists has long suffered in comparison with that of its writers; they have been aesthetic outcasts, thought hardly worthy of consideration. Even the stately portraits of Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, so highly prized by America’s turn-of-the-century collectors, came to seem superficial, especially when compared to the glorious counterparts produced by Italian, French, Spanish, or Dutch artists. William Blake’s mystical watercolors, long considered little more than adjuncts to his poetry, are now more justly valued; so are Constable and Turner, who have been recognized as among the great innovators of the nineteenth century. Yet apart from a few such names, British art has been, to most people, an unknown quantity, a presumptive wasteland.

One man who holds a diametrically opposed view is Paul Mellon, who for the past twenty years or so has had a corner on the English art market. When he first started buying, he was regarded, with the indulgence customarily accorded millionaires, as an amiable eccentric. But this view was considerably revised when he allowed parts of his collection to be shown publicly, first at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 1963 and subsequently at Britain’s own Royal Academy. Now he has given his vast accumulation, along with an $18-million building designed by the late Louis Kahn, to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1929. Containing some 30,000 objects dating from the Elizabethan period to the mid-nineteenth century, the brandnew Yale Center for British Art enables Americans to reassess more justly the work of our cultural forebears.

The reputation of English artists has long suffered in comparison with that of its writers; they have been aesthetic outcasts, thought hardly worthy of consideration. Even the stately portraits of Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, so highly prized by America’s turn-of-the-century collectors, came to seem superficial, especially when compared to the glorious counterparts produced by Italian, French, Spanish, or Dutch artists. William Blake’s mystical watercolors, long considered little more than adjuncts to his poetry, are now more justly valued; so are Constable and Turner, who have been recognized as among the great innovators of the nineteenth century. Yet apart from a few such names, British art has been, to most people, an unknown quantity, a presumptive wasteland.

One man who holds a diametrically opposed view is Paul Mellon, who for the past twenty years or so has had a corner on the English art market. When he first started buying, he was regarded, with the indulgence customarily accorded millionaires, as an amiable eccentric. But this view was considerably revised when he allowed parts of his collection to be shown publicly, first at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 1963 and subsequently at Britain’s own Royal Academy. Now he has given his vast accumulation, along with an $18-million building designed by the late Louis Kahn, to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1929. Containing some 30,000 objects dating from the Elizabethan period to the mid-nineteenth century, the brandnew Yale Center for British Art enables Americans to reassess more justly the work of our cultural forebears.