A Mellon Aviary

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

 The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build Her humble nest, 
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.

photographs Sotheby's, Property from the Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon 
Sale dates November, 20-23

Splendour in the Grass

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one of The Stars, one of the brightest and prettiest , one with the eyes of a child.

Natalia

born July 20, 1938, died November 29, 1981

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be not forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
Grief not, rather find,
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of Human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death
In years that bring philophic mind.

 -536.Ode, William Wordsworth

Orson Welles said of her as a child actress in her first film, she was "so good, she was terrifying, and from there to Miracle on 34th Street, to young ingenue in Rebel Without A Cause, All the Fine Young Cannibals, to Maria in West Side Story. Director Elia Kazan cast her in Splendour in the Grass for her "true-blue quality with a wanton side that is held down by social pressure," adding that "she clings to things with her eyes." She was 23 and this was her second Academy Award Nomination for the role of Deanie in Splendour. Then there was Gypsy, Inside Daisy Clover and on to Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice- there were more, but not quite enough.



& She somehow managed to stay so beautiful in 1960's and 1970's Hollywood.

photographed by Penati for Vogue 1970 January, in Zandra Rhodes, above,

and on the 1967 January cover, top.

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the world is too much with us

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"the decadent material cynicism of the time."  ~ WW

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. …

William Wordsworth

The world in 1806? Wordsworth wrote this sonnet from Grasmere, a Lake District village, but was Life Simple? Not in the eyes of Wordsworth. The onslaught of the Industrial Revolution colored Wordworth's bucolic view. Doesn't each generation faces these "wastes to our powers ?"  

My mother started reciting this poem today- the year she memorized it might have been 1944- a Simpler time?  Pearl Harbor was in the past, a brother was at war, a father died suddenly, a nation of women stepped out of their traditional roles- not so simple.  

More than 200 years have past and the words resonate, reverberate to a "sorid boon." The sonnet may seem horribly outdated, I think it beautiful. I hear it today in the dissonant  heavy Rap-despised by aesthetes- expressing hostility to Capitalism, the industrial complex. It is all in conflict with the search for Our Beautiful Life-that which defines You.

What defines You? How do you reconcile the quest for the material beauties of man with the quest for the beauties of nature? Do you?

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