The unprecedented ease of Bunny Mellon's style.
Over a Regency red and yellow japanned faux bamboo bookcase, c.1805, hangs a Braque painting, Les Deux Oiseaux and housed in the bookcase-a collection of birds.
In a world of rooms touted by magazine editors full of beige this and that-to my eye most mudane, Mrs. Mellon's genius style lies in her having kept her eye honed for what she loved, and artists she revered. She surrounded herself with nature inside her houses when she could not be in her gardens. No doubt with the wealth she had before marrying Paul Mellon, it could have been easy for some to lapse into rooms of souless, staid grandeur.
Not so, Mrs. Mellon gives us a glimpse of beauty in rooms, in its highest form.
Pure, personal, and what appears uncalculated, precisely edited.
There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air.
-Couplet about Birds, Thomas Gray, 18th c. poet
1 of a Pair of Italian Scagliola Panels, 18th c., Lot 307
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all-
-314, Emily Dickinson, American poet, 19th c.
A Dutch delft six-tile pictorial panel second half 18th c., Lot 923
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A dove house filld with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro all its regions
-Auguries of Innocence, William Blake, c. 1803
Le Balcon Et La Cage D'Oiseau, Tsuguharu Foujita, 1917. Lot 408
Friends shall I have at dawn, blackbird and thrush
To rouse me, and a hundred Warblers more;
And if those Eagles to their ancient Hold
Return, Helvellyn's Eagles! with the Pair
From my own door I shall be free to claim
Acquaintance as they sweep from cloud to cloud.
The Owl that gives the name to Owlet-Crag
Have I heard whooping, and he soon will be
A chosen one of my regards. . .
-Home At Grassmere, Wordsworth, c.1806.
An Aviary, Madeline Hewes. Lot 1491
Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
-To A Skylark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 19th century Romantic poet
Two Victorian painted Tôle Birdcages, second half 19th c. Lot 992
Young Girl Holding A Bird, Jean Braun, 1749.
Lot 344
Lot 344
The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build
Her humble nest,
lies silent in the field.
lies silent in the field.
-Of The Queen,Edmund Waller,17th c.
Bunny Mellon teaches us the art of living at home, rather than so today-those who are ever seeming to perfect that art, yet never staying home to inhabit it.
