Gifts, acquisitions celebrated in British art exhibition

NEW HAVEN » Health experts say it pays to be grateful every day for blessings. So it’s nice when the well-endowed not only cherish their wealth but share it with the rest of us.

The Yale Center for British Art this summer is celebrating its great fortune of art in the secondfloor exhibition “A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions.”

Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, said the gallery in its 40th year “remains a bedrock in our own history because it is such an extraordinarily important one in the support of the study of British art...”

All of YCBA’s programs flow from the original work and gifts of Paul Mellon, who graduated from Yale College in 1929 after studying British literature and history.

Mellon was the son of National Gallery of Art founder Andrew Mellon, of course, and watched his father create a great institution. The son became even more involved in philanthropy, said Meyers, leading to several Yale programs and professorships.

And his gifts led to the British art center, of course, led locally by Jules Prown. Endowments helped build and support the Chapel Street building and its continuing acquisitions, many coming from the busy collectors Andrew and Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, his wife.

“Mr. Mellon allowed Mrs. Mellon, on his death, to continue to live with works that she particularly loved,” said Meyers at a recent preview. “He wasn’t going to strip the walls of all of their houses . ... Those works (largely intimate, personal objects) came to be known as the ‘life interest works.’”

Rachel Mellon died in 2014 at 104, but as she aged and closed houses the personal art treasures owned by her late husband came to the Yale center — “completing the gift that had started really with the founding documents (of YCBA) in 1966.”

Meyers said that after last year’s renovations and reopening, it was time to celebrate those works, on the center’s 40th anniversary. But other collectors have also stepped up in recent years to donate their works to the center “because we provide the context for those objects in ways other institutions cannot,” said Meyers, noting that Yale makes sure the objects are accessible either in person for research or online.

“A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions” has been curated by Elisabeth Fairman, chief curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts; Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of Art Collections; Lars Kokkonen, assistant curator of paintings and sculpture; and Sarah Welcome, assistant curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts; under the direction of Scott Wilcox, deputy director for collections. The exhibition runs through Aug. 13.

The exhibition is broken up into a suite of mini-exhibitions by themes, said Wilcox — childhood and education, war and conflicts and the natural world.

“But one of the things that you should note as you go through is there are interesting strands that kind of bind the different sections together,” said Wilcox.

Among the art work is James Seymour’s “The Chaise Match Run on Newmarket Heath” (1750) and a group of eight paintings by the pre-eminent British modernist Ben Nicholson. There are gifts from other significant donors, such as Joseph McCrindle and Brian Sewell, including paintings and drawings by Augustus John, fashionable society portraits by Sir William Orpen and Glyn Warren Philpot, and a number of works by the landscape and still-life painter Eliot Hodgkin.

Other objects on display are an early map sampler (1806) by a 9-yearold girl; a manuscript by a French naval officer who took part in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805); a World War II silk escape map; and a rare early sciagraph (X-ray) of a lizard from a series of images of British reptiles (1897).

Some of the most important additions to the center’s collection of historic British drawing includes masterpieces in watercolor by Thomas Girtin and David Cox, also showcased, as are works in pastel, portrait miniatures and more recent photographs by the likes of Lewis Morley.

The British art center is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. most days, noon to 5 Sundays and closed Mondays. Admission is free.

PHOTO COURTESY OF YCBA Portrait of Lady Pringle, née Emilia Anne MacLeod.

PHOTO COURTESY OF RONNIE RHYZ / YCBA “Jedburgh Abbey from the South East,” by Thomas Girtin.

PHOTO COURTESY OF YCBA James Seymour’s “The Chaise Match Run on Newmarket Heath.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF YCBA From the modern era is Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s “Anethum Graveolens (Dillweed) impression with Betty, in full flower.”