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A very British collection
By Tom Teodorczuk, Evening Standard 27.02.07
New arrival: JMW Turner's Dort Or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat From Rotterdam, is one of over 150 paintings from Paul Mellon's collection to go on show at the Royal Academy
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The largest collection of British art outside the UK will go on display at the Royal Academy this autumn.
Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion For British Art, taken from the art philanthropist's collection based at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, will come to the RA in October.
Mellon, a passionate Anglophile who died in 1999, assembled an unrivalled collection including 2,000 paintings, 35,000 rare books and several hundred pieces of sculpture.
More than 150 paintings will be on show including work by William Blake, George Stubbs and William Hogarth. Pictures such as Turner's 1817 masterpiece Dort Or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat From Rotterdam-will leave Yale University for the first time.
Mellon, himself a Fellow of the Royal Academy, left $5 million in his will to the institution. A large number of the artists represented in the show were Royal Academicians.
A spokeswoman for the Yale Centre, set up by Mellon 30 years ago, said: "I don't know anybody who developed such a great British art collection.
"Paul Mellon was fascinated by every artistic subject of English life, whether it was conversation pieces, portraiture, sporting art or landscape.
"His collection captures the breadth and depth of British life."
The exhibition will come to the RA after a three-month show at the Yale Art Centre. David Cannadine, who published a biography of Mellon's father, banking tycoon Andrew Mellon, said: "Paul Mellon thought of himself as middle class. But he sought to continue and develop his father's status as a leading art philanthropist."
Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion For British Art runs at the Royal Academy from 20 October to 27 January 2008.
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