Fitzwilliam Museum Presents Paul Mellon

Son of the prominent Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Mellon and his English wife Nora McMullen, Paul Mellon was a dedicated Anglophile who from his childhood years in Britain and time at Cambridge University in the early 1930s developed a life-long love of English culture. He went on to create one of the greatest collections of British art outside this country with which he founded the Yale Center for British Art in 1977, and his generosity to the many English institutions with which he had long-standing ties is of equal renown.

Paul Mellon: A Cambridge Tribute traces his love of British art and sport to the formative years he spent as a post-graduate at Clare College, Cambridge, from 1929 to 1931. 'It was while I was at Cambridge that I embarked on the dangerous seas of collecting,' Paul Mellon once said - a statement that has had profound implications not only for the Fitzwilliam Museum but also for other major beneficiaries, both in this country and in the US, of the man who described himself as 'the incurable collector.'

Comprising works from the Museum and from Mr Mellon's own collection lent by the Yale Center for British Art, the exhibition focuses both on his personal taste and on the reasons that led to the formation of his definitive collection of British art.

On display will be paintings, drawings, prints, books, applied arts and memorabilia that are connected to Paul Mellon's British interests. From the Fitzwilliam Museum's own collection, these will include major eighteenth and nineteenth-century paintings such as George Stubbs' Gimcrack and John Constable's Hampstead Heath, as well as works on paper by William Blake and Thomas Rowlandson. Loans from the Yale Center for British Art will include biographical material such as William Orpen's Portrait of Paul Mellon and relevant subjects such as Stubbs' Newmarket Heath with a Rubbing-down House. Sir Alfred Munnings' specially commissioned portrait of Paul Mellon on Dublin will form the centrepiece of the exhibition alongside Tessa Pullan's bronze bust of Paul Mellon on loan from Clare College, Cambridge.

Duncan Robinson, Director of The Fitzwilliam Museum, said: "In Cambridge, both personally and through the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Paul Mellon generously supported the Fitzwilliam Museum and several Faculties of the University of Cambridge, Clare College and Clare Hall from its foundation in 1966 onwards. We are honoured to have this opportunity, one hundred years after his birth, to pay tribute to one of Cambridge's major twentieth-century benefactors."

The Yale Center for British Art will commemorate the centennial of its founder's birth with the special exhibition Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art (18 April - 29 July) which will also be shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (20 October 2007 - 27 January 2008). Other centenary celebrations are planned in this country and abroad. -- www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk