| The
Collections
Paintings & sculpture
The collection contains about 1500 paintings, and
its particular strength in the period from William Hogarth in the
eighteenth century to J. M. W. Turner in the nineteenth century
reflects the tastes and interests of the Center's founder, Paul
Mellon. In a broader way, however, it relates the story of British
art since the end of the Middle Ages. There is a choice group of
paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly portraits,
and also some representative Victorian, modern and contemporary
works. Thanks to acquisitions made through the Paul Mellon Fund
as well as by Paul Mellon himself, British art of the past hundred
years has been a growing strength, and the Center boasts fine holdings
in Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, the Bloomsbury Group,
and Paul Mellon's favorite British painters of his own lifetime:
Gwen John, Alfred Munnings, and Ben Nicholson.
The
story of British art is by no means confined to British artists;
several major figures from Continental Europe and America painted
for British patrons or spent periods of their careers in Britain,
and these are also represented in the collection. They include Peter
Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Pompeo Batoni, Canaletto, John Singleton
Copley, Benjamin West, and James McNeill Whistler.
Prints
and Drawings
A collection of over 20,000 drawings and watercolors
and over 30,000 prints. The collection offers a comprehensive view
of the development of British graphic art, beginning with the great
Elizabethan and Jacobean miniaturists, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac
Oliver, and extending through the twentieth century. The emphasis
is on the flowering of the British watercolor school in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The
collection was begun by Paul Mellon, whose love of British sporting
art is reflected by his acquisition of fine drawings by James Seymour,
Sawrey Gilpin, James Ward, and George Stubbs, and an exhaustive
selection of sporting prints. Over the years, Mr. Mellon's acquisition
of complete collections assembled by distinguished connoisseurs
expanded the scope of the collection and came to form its heart.
These
important building blocks of the collection have been supplemented
by the ongoing acquisition of individual works by artists such as
Sir James Thornhill, William Hogarth, Paul Sandby, Alexander and
John Robert Cozens, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. There are nearly two
hundred lively drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, and William Blake
is represented by one of the foremost collections of his illuminated
books, in rare combination with his drawings, watercolors, tempera
paintings, and prints. Of the nineteenth-century masters, John Constable,
Samuel Palmer, Peter DeWint, David Cox, Richard Parkes Bonington,
John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites are all well represented. The
limitless variety of Turner can be seen in what is perhaps the best
balanced group of watercolors by him outside London, together with
the important collection of prints by and after Turner assembled
by Sir Stephen Courtauld. The collection, rare outside England,
of large-scale "exhibition" watercolors culminates in John Frederick
Lewis's masterwork The Frank Encampment, of which Ruskin wrote:
"One day men will come from far away, and will go back to their
homes saying 'I have seen it'." Areas of specialized interest in
the collections include architectural drawings, topographical prints,
caricatures, mezzotint portraits, and Shakespearean subjects. The
architectural collection includes portfolios from the studios of
Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, Thomas
Hope, and A.W.N. Pugin. There are numerous presentation drawings,
often of considerable size and splendor. Among the many topographical
prints, the Nathan collection documents, in several thousand engraved
views, the architectural transformation of London over three centuries.
In 1970 Paul Mellon acquired the Pierpont Morgan collection of mezzotints,
which traces the "English manner" of engraving from its earliest
appearance in seventeenth-century Holland to its heyday in England
at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1976 the Center acquired
a large group of drawings and prints from the American Shakespeare
Theater of Stratford, Connecticut, which constitutes an important
archive of Shakespearean iconography. Recently the Department has
expanded its representation of twentieth-century graphic art, with
important acquisitions of works by Walter Sickert, Henri Gaudier-Brezska,
Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, and Stanley Spencer. Forty
watercolors and drawings by Augustus and Gwen John represent one
of the largest collections of their work outside the United Kingdom.
There is an equal number of sheets devoted to the decorations for
the infamous cabaret club, the Cave of the Golden Calf These include
most of Spencer Gore's preparatory drawings for the murals, Eric
Gill's design for the entrance sign, and Wyndham Lewis's magnificent
watercolor study for his lost oil Kermesse. Among the prints are
signature examples and portfolios by Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg,
C.R.W. Nevinson, John Banting, Keith Vaughan, Graham Sutherland,
David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Peter
Doig, Langlands and Bell, and Gary Hume.
The
Study Room
The Department organizes regular exhibitions to show different aspects
of its holdings, but these are, of necessity, temporary displays
since works on paper are easily damaged by exposure to light. Consequently,
the Study Room is the principal means of access to the Center's
collections of prints, drawings and rare books should be thought
of as a library, rich in historical and cultural information and
inviting private exploration. No appointment is required.
Study
Room Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Rare
Books & Archives
A
rare book collection of approximately 20,000 volumes. The emphasis
is on material relating to the visual arts and cultural life in
the United Kingdom and former British Empire from the 17th through
the end of the 19th century. The collection also includes certain
20th-century private press books as well as a growing collection
of contemporary artists' books.
The
core of the collection of illustrated books is the material amassed
by Major J.R. Abbey, one of the first collectors of British "color-plate"
books. That collection, acquired as a whole by Paul Mellon in the
1950s, includes over 2,000 volumes describing British life, customs,
scenery, and travel during the period 1770-1860. The often lavish
illustrations in these books are the work of Britain's finest landscape
artists, including Paul Sandby, David Cox, John Constable, J.M.W.
Turner, Samuel Prout, and the Daniell family, among others. At the
same time, they form a coherent picture of local topography, architecture,
and the sights encountered by British travelers on the Grand Tour
in Europe and on more exotic travels to the South Seas, Africa,
and India.
The
"Life" section of the Abbey collection includes works on many diverse
subjects, such as satire and caricature, sports and pastimes, social
conduct, etiquette, costume, the army and navy (including fortification
designs, accounts of battles and ships), entertainments and theatrical
events, music and dance, panoramas, transportation systems (roads,
canals, railways), natural history and popular science, illustrated
children's books and games, and toy theater. There is a comprehensive
collection of material relating to the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Major
Abbey's four-volume catalogue of this collection, originally published
between 1952 and 1957 (Scenery of Great Britain and Ireland in Aquatint
and Lithography, 1770-1860; Life in England in Aquatint and Lithography,
1770-1860; and Travel in Aquatint and Lithography, 1770-1860), remains
the standard bibliography, but additions have more than tripled
the number of books in the original Abbey Collection. In many cases
these additions are of different works in the same subject area;
in others they duplicate titles already held, but with plates in
different states, with extra illustrations, or in original wrappers
with advertisements intact.
Another
major collection purchased as a whole by Paul Mellon was that of
Rupert Gunnis, antiquary and scholar best known for his Dictionary
of British Sculptors. His collection of books and manuscripts on
British local history, architecture, sculpture, and genealogy spans
four centuries.
The
collection also contains quite a number of early maps and atlases.
All the important British cartographers are represented and the
great landmarks of British cartography may be found as well, including
Christopher Saxton's county atlas, John Speed's Theater of the Empire
of Great Britain, John Ogilby's Britannia, John Seller's English
Pilot, a unique copy of Des Barres' Atlantic Neptune, many editions
of the atlases of Moll, Morden, and Jefferys, as well as the first
edition of the Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain and 3,000 loose
county maps in various states and editions. One of the great treasures
of the collection is the earliest surviving manuscript map showing
Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation (ca. 1587)
The
extensive collection of illustrated books also provides a survey
of the history of color printing from the earliest examples of the
18th-century revival of the chiaroscuro woodcut to aquatint to the
development of chromolithography in the 1850s. There are works printed
by George Baxter and his followers in the art of chromoxylography,
as well as earlier material color-printed in mezzotint or stipple
engraving.
The
collection includes hundreds of artists' manuals, dating from 1600-1900.
They range from simple drawing manuals to advanced treatises on
technique, perspective, optics, pigments, anatomy, and aesthetic
theory. Some copies were owned by British artists and contain their
annotations. There are groups of material by and about John Ruskin,
works of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick, and a collection of books
and manuscripts relating to Sir Joshua Reynolds bequeathed to the
Center in 1973 by Frederick W. Hilles. Archival material in the
collection includes letters, journals, and account books by artists,
including Thomas Gainsborough, David Roberts, James Ward, A.W.N.
Pugin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Vanessa Bell.
The extensive James Bruce archive contains journals, letters, drawings,
and watercolors relating to his 18th-century expedition undertaken
to discover the source of the Nile.
Although
the book collection is particularly strong in 18th- and 19th-century
holdings, it also includes some of the first books printed in the
English language. There are thirteen books printed by William Caxton,
as well as representative examples of other 15th- and 16th-century
printers. The collection also includes some 1,300 individual leaves
from illustrated incunables (books printed before 1501), most from
books printed on the Continent.
Computerized
cataloging of the Center's rare books is in progress. Records for
the collection are on ORBIS and provide detailed access by author,
title, subjects, artists and engravers, techniques of illustration,
publishers and printers, place of publication, provenance and binder.
The
Study Room
The
Department organizes regular exhibitions to show different aspects
of its holdings, but these are, of necessity, temporary displays
since works on paper are easily damaged by exposure to light. Consequently,
the Study Room is the principal means of access to the Center's
collections of prints, drawings, and rare books.
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