Paul Mellon was one of America's greatest art collectors and remains one of the Gallery's leading benefactors. Timed to coincide with the Gallery's 75th anniversary, a special exhibition of 100 of the finest pastels, watercolors, drawings, prints, and illustrated books selected from his donations celebrates both his wonderful generosity and his distinctive approach to his collection.
took great pleasure in seeing the works day after day, like special friends in a domestic setting. The exhibition (08.05.2016 - 02.10.2016) evokes this intimate context for watercolors portraying earlier American scenes by Winslow Homer and Maurice Prendergast; powerful portrait drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Edgar Degas; sporting lithographs byThéodore Géricault and George Bellows; abstracting linear pen landscapes by Vincent van Gogh; colorful visions of Parisian entertainments by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jacques Villon; complex cubist compositions by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Georges Braque; and delightful watercolors of a cucumber (by Édouard Manet) and a flight of butterflies (by Odilon Redon). (Text: National Gallery of Art)