Why so much of the best English painting hangs in Connecticut

21 October 2026

If you want to stand in front of the largest group of George Stubbs paintings anywhere outside Britain, you go to New Haven, Connecticut. The same building holds the Turner that Constable called the most complete work of genius he had ever seen, the Constable he was grievously nervous about showing, and Wright of Derby's first forge. The Yale Center for British Art is the biggest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, and almost all of it came from one man.

Paul Mellon was the son of Andrew Mellon, the banker and Treasury Secretary who gave Washington its National Gallery. The father collected old masters. The son went to Cambridge in the late 1920s, learned to ride to hounds, and came home with a taste for the England of the eighteenth century — its horses, its sporting pictures, its country-house landscapes. He later said the first painting he ever bought was a Stubbs: a chestnut racehorse called Pumpkin and the stable-lad who looked after him, painted in beeswax and oil on a wooden panel in 1774. It is the picture at the top of this page.

What he bought and why it was available

Mellon started buying seriously in the late 1950s, and the timing was everything. British aristocratic collections were breaking up under death duties. The pictures that had hung in the same houses since they were painted — the Stubbs commissioned by the men whose horses they showed, the Turner that Walter Fawkes bought from the artist for 500 guineas in 1818 and that stayed at Farnley Hall for a hundred and fifty years — were coming to market. British museums, short of money and often of interest, let them go. Mellon took them in quantity and with a connoisseur's eye, advised by Basil Taylor, and in 1966 announced the gift of the whole collection to Yale with a building to put it in.

The building, designed by Louis Kahn and finished after his death in 1974, opened on 15 April 1977. The collection today is more than two thousand paintings, twenty thousand drawings and watercolours, forty thousand prints and the rare-book library that goes with them. By accession number alone you can read the story: the Stubbs lion and horse is B1977.14.71, the lion and stag is B1977.14.72, the same size to the inch and catalogued side by side.

What that means if you want a print

Here is the part that matters for anyone who wants these pictures on a wall rather than in a book. The Yale Center photographs its public-domain works at very high resolution — the Blacksmith's Shop file is 7,500 pixels across — and puts the images online under terms that say, in so many words, that you may download and use them for any purpose without asking permission or paying a fee. A photo credit is requested, not required.

That is not how it works in London. The National Gallery, Tate and most of the great British collections let you look at their public-domain pictures online and stop there: the terms are non-commercial, and a licence for anything else is priced per image. The painting may belong to everyone — Turner has been dead since 1851 — but the photograph of it belongs to the museum, and the museum charges.

So the English paintings you can own a faithful print of, at a fair price, tend to be the ones that crossed the Atlantic. Mellon's taste decides, half a century on, which Stubbs you can hang in your hall. The five painters on this site — Turner, Constable, Stubbs, Gainsborough and Wright of Derby — are shown through the pictures of theirs that hang in New Haven for exactly that reason. Every image is credited to the collection beneath it, which is the least the collection asks and the most it has ever been owed.

Sources

• Yale Center for British Art — using images of works in the public domain
• Yale Center for British Art — our story
• Wikipedia — Yale Center for British Art
• Yale Center for British Art — Pumpkin with a Stable-lad
• Yale Center for British Art — Dort, or Dordrecht (B1977.14.77)
• Yale Center for British Art — A Lion Attacking a Horse (B1977.14.71)
• Yale Center for British Art — The Blacksmith's Shop (B1981.25.712)