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Two Collections, Two Canons: What Andrew and Paul Mellon Built, One Generation Apart

A father spent decades quietly assembling one of America’s great Old Master collections without intending to build a museum. His son inherited the museum before he inherited the eye—and went on to build a collection entirely his own. 

Most of the great American collections were made by one person operating on one instinct. Frick’s was built through resolve and a growing intolerance for anything less than the best. Gardner’s was built through decades of looking before she ever bought. The National Gallery of Art in Washington was built differently, by two people who barely overlapped in their taste and never really discussed a shared plan: a father who spent thirty years buying Old Masters as a private citizen, and a son who inherited an unfinished museum at thirty and spent the rest of his life finishing it, funding it and eventually building an entirely separate collection that had almost nothing to do with his father’s.

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Andrew Mellon conceived the National Gallery. Paul Mellon built it, kept it running for over four decades and then quietly developed something else beside it. Their story is really about what happens when one generation hands an unfinished project to the next—and what the next generation chooses to do with the room that leaves. 

Andrew Mellon: a banker’s eye, built in private

Andrew Mellon did not set out to found a museum. For most of his adult life, he was simply a serious, private collector—a banker and industrialist from Pittsburgh who began buying art in the mid-1890s, encouraged by his friend Henry Clay Frick and guided, in his early years, by the dealer Charles Carstairs. It’s worth pausing on that detail: the same relationship that shaped Frick’s collecting—Carstairs, Knoedler, a Pittsburgh fortune learning to recognize a masterpiece—shaped Mellon’s as well. The two men moved in the same circles, competed for some of the same pictures and were educated, in a sense, by the same dealer.

Mellon bought steadily and without fanfare for decades, working primarily through Knoedler and, at times, Joseph Duveen, building a collection that by the 1920s was already considered among the finest in Washington. He was a banker’s collector—deliberate and unhurried, with little taste for publicity—and there was little to suggest, through most of his life, that he was building toward anything beyond his own walls.

Then, in the early 1930s, while serving as Treasury Secretary and while the U.S. government he represented refused to formally recognize the Soviet Union, Mellon made the boldest and least characteristic move of his collecting life. The Soviet government, desperate for hard currency to fund industrialization, had begun quietly selling masterpieces out of the Hermitage. Dealers across Europe had been chasing the story for years. Duveen reportedly tried to buy the entire group outright and failed. Mellon, working discreetly through Knoedler’s international contacts, succeeded where Duveen could not. Between 1930 and 1931, he acquired 21 paintings from the Hermitage—among them Jan Van Eyck’s........

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