Essays in Honor of Paul Mellon: Collector and Benefactor by John Wilmerding (Editor); Paperback; Washington : National Gallery of Art ; Hanover [N.H.] : Distributed by University Press of New England, ©1986; condition: great
In 1936, Paul Mellon purchased his first British painting, Pumpkin with a Stable-lad, by George Stubbs, an artist who remained a favorite throughout his life and whose reputation his collecting did much to rehabilitate. From the late 1950s he began to amass a major collection of British art with the help and encouragement of English art historian Basil Taylor. By 1963 the collection was large and comprehensive enough to mount a seminal exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which then traveled to the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition helped revive serious interest in British art among scholars. As the London art dealer Geoffrey Agnew once put it: “It took an American collector to make the English look again at their own paintings.”