Please address specific questions about the Paintings and Sculpture Collection to: Angus Trumble Curator of Paintings and Sculpture 203 432 2844 203 432 9695 F paintings.bac@yale.edu

The Center’s collection of approximately 1,900 paintings and 100 sculptures vividly narrates the story of British art, life, and culture since the end of the Middle Ages. Particularly strong in the period from the birth of William Hogarth (1697) to the death of J. M. W. Turner (1851), the collection reflects the tastes and interests of its founder, the late Paul Mellon. Among the artists best represented are William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Joseph Wright of Derby, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. The Center’s collection ranges from a late-fifteenth-century Nottingham alabaster to paintings and sculpture by such twentieth-century artists as Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and, most recently, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst. The story of British art is by no means confined to artists born in the British Isles. Major figures from continental Europe and America painted for British patrons or spent periods of their careers in Britain. Among those featured in the collection are Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck (both working at the Court of King Charles I), Canaletto and Pompeo Batoni (both much patronized by British grand tourists), Johann Zoffany, and the great Americans John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and James McNeill Whistler. While the Center’s large collection of British portraits contains grand full-lengths by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Thomas Lawrence, the real character of this collection comes from portraits of a less imposing type, known as “conversation pieces.” These delightful, small-scale family groups achieved great popularity during the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century, and partly reflect the upsurge both in more intimate, small-scale domestic interiors, and a great broadening of the market for pictures. Artists like Hogarth, Gainsborough, Zoffany, and Arthur Devis were among the best practitioners of this genre, and the Center’s collection of conversation pieces by these artists is world-renowned. Equally stunning is the Center’s rich array of British landscape paintings. From meticulously drafted bird’s-eye views of country estates in the period of the Restoration (1660), through spectacular visions of the English countryside à la Claude, to modern views of the Cornish coastline, the collection offers a provocative account of the evolution in Britain of ideas, dreams, and debates about town and country, agriculture, blood stock, rural labor, and the natural world. Of particular note are works by the greatest British landscape painters of the eighteenth century, Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson, and by their nineteenth-century counterparts, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Visitors will savor Turner’s Dort (or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed), and his elemental view of wind and spray against a rocky coastline in the Hebrides, Staffa, Fingal's Cave; Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, his full-scale sketch for Stratford Mill, and a number of his famous cloud studies; as well as a brilliant group of views in France and Italy by the great Richard Parkes Bonington. Thanks to the special interests of Mr. Mellon, the Center also has one of the greatest collections of British sporting and animal paintings in the world. It includes a number of pictures by the preeminent artist of this genre, George Stubbs. Foxhunting, horseracing, and other equestrian scenes by John Wootton, James Seymour, Sawrey Gilpin, James Ward, Jean-Laurent Agasse, Benjamin Marshall, John Ferneley, and Alfred Munnings are among the Center’s treasures. Other genres represented prominently in the collection are marine painting, especially the works of Samuel Scott and Charles Brooking; the London cityscape, including a remarkable group of views on the Thames by Canaletto; artists’ self-portraits (from Godfrey Kneller to Vanessa Bell); the work of travel artists, with special emphasis on India and Pakistan; and scenes from the plays of Shakespeare, together with many portraits of eighteenth-century character actors, of which the finest is surely Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Love for Love by William Congreve. The Center’s growing collection of sculpture is especially strong in works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists such as Peter Scheemakers, Louis-Francois Roubiliac, Joseph Nollekens, and Francis Chantrey. The Center also holds spectacular examples of twentieth-century sculpture, including works by Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and distinguished contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.