For my entire life, I have been followed by Paul Mellon.

Nevermind that I never actually met the man, or that he died when I was in middle school. I think that everyone has someone – an artist, an author, a trainer, a breeder, who keeps turning up in little ways in the background of an unrelated life.

This became increasingly clear to me when I walked through the National Museum of Racing’s special exhibit titled “The Passions of Paul Mellon: Horses, Art, and Philanthropy.” The exhibit runs through March 2025, and if you needed an extra excuse to visit the museum in the cold winter months, consider this your sign.

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Before I visited the exhibit last summer, I mostly knew Mellon as a well-off Virginia horseman who’d kept unimaginable acreage in the very expensive Middleburg area, and of course I knew him as a Pillar of the Turf who enjoyed success with what I vaguely thought of as turfy horses. And, for me, he was the guy with the cool paintings.

As a horse-crazy child living in Virginia, I tried to find horses anywhere I could before I was old enough to actually begin riding lessons – on television, which is how I fell in love with racing, in the school library, anywhere at all. It was no surprise to anyone that my favorite part of a visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was the British Sporting Art gallery, which is entirely devoted to oil paintings and sculpture depicting racehorses and fox hunts of centuries gone by. The gallery takes up an entire wing of the building and is entirely populated with art works from Paul Mellon’s collections. The statue of Mill Reef, the painting of Henry Legard trying to coax his favorite hunter with a pan of grain, and renderings of poor Count Sandor’s hunting mishaps are all old friends I visit whenever I’m in Richmond.

Paul Mellon was one of two heirs to the fortune of his father, banker and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, so he had a staggering amount of wealth behind him from the start. As a young man, he worked for his father’s bank for a short time before nervously sitting down to have a frank conversation with him about how much he hated the relentless push of capitalism. He was surprised when Andrew told him, essentially, he could let the machine work for him and stay largely out of the day-to-day of the business.

These days, it’s not fashionable to have too much admiration for beneficiaries of generational wealth, but Mellon did something I have a great deal of respect for, which was to use his resources to pursue his interests in a responsible way while working hard to improve the lives of others. When he parted ways from day-to-day operations at the bank, Paul Mellon swore himself to a lifetime of philanthropy and set about giving away as much of his wealth as was reasonable.

The estate/farm of the late Paul Mellon in Upperville, VA, is for sale. Asking price is $70M
The estate/farm of the late Paul Mellon in Upperville, VA
Horses – not just the sight of them, but an actual partnership with them – were a key part of his life from the beginning. Mellon spent much of his early years going between the United States and England, as his mother was English and he eventually studied at Cambridge. He rode from an early age and fell in love with fox hunting and flying around in point-to-points (sometimes to the neglect of his school attendance), and even had a horse named Dublin who traveled back and forth across the Atlantic with him. He started as the owner of steeplechasers in the 1930s and in his autobiography, “Reflections in a Silver Spoon,” recalls his refusal to enter his first two horses in a prestigious stakes after making the judgment the course would be too tough on them and he didn’t want to risk an injury – this, nearly a century before we started talking about serious injuries as a social license problem. He began breeding horses for flat racing, both in America and abroad, and seems to have adhered to the philosophy that he was only going to produce horses he could stand behind.

You may know him best for Arts and Letters and Fort Marcy, both Hall of Famers, or Kentucky Derby winner Sea Hero and Belmont winner Quadrangle. His most accomplished runner was undoubtedly Mill Reef, a Virginia-bred who won the Epsom Derby and Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe, making Mellon the only owner to capture those classics alongside the Kentucky Derby. His greatest source of pride was that Mill Reef was a third generation member of the Rokeby Stables tradition.

When I did a study abroad program in England during college, a statue of Mill Reef featured prominently during our tour of the National Stud in Newmarket. When I would return years later to cover the Tattersalls October sale, not only did Mill Reef pop up in the far reaches of the pedigrees, but a bronze bust of Mellon looked down at me from the gallery at the National Horse Racing Museum as I toured its exhibits for some features in the Paulick Report.

Besides horses, art was a great passion for Mellon, starting with the sporting art I remember so fondly and expanding into French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, collected alongside his second wife, Bunny. Mellon took over his father’s project of building, funding, and filling the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., but parts of his enormous collection can also be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had a free morning during a reporting trip to New York and stumbled across his name while wandering through the Met’s Degas exhibit, and learned Mellon had rescued the wax statues Degas made to help him understand how to paint the ballet dancers that made him famous (as well as horses in various phases of gallop strides). In the end, Mellon served as the National Gallery’s president for many years and underwrote over $94 million to get its East Building opened. Despite this, he declined to have his name put on the Gallery or many of the other buildings he donated through the years, averse to the public recognition it would invite.

As early as the 1950s, Mellon became startled by a report titled “Our Vanishing Shoreline” and devoted resources to beach and coastal preservation. One of those projects was to preserve the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which I did not know as I climbed the 268 steps to the top of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse on North Carolina’s Outer Banks during a family vacation in the early 2000s.

A proud Yale graduate (a quality I cannot claim to have in common with him), Mellon also gifted art, rare books, and endowed a number of professorships at his alma mater. As someone whose “to be read” pile never seems to shrink and includes vintage books alongside modern novels, I can appreciate his higher-budget version of something similar.

“I have been an amateur in every phase of my life,” Mellon once wrote of himself. “An amateur poet, an amateur scholar, an amateur horseman, an amateur farmer, an amateur soldier, an amateur connoisseur of art, an amateur publisher, and an amateur museum executive. The root of the word ‘amateur’ is the Latin word for love, and I can honestly say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the roles I have played.”

I just love that.

Whether you know it or not, you’ve benefitted from Mellon’s gifts, too. If you’ve met someone at the Sea Hero statue in the Saratoga paddock, or admired the bronze of Secretariat under the trees at Belmont, you’ve appreciated his eye for art. If you’ve adopted a horse or donated a horse into the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, you’ve interacted with one of his many charities. (There are enough non-profits receiving money from him that their names fill a floor-to-ceiling wall in the National Museum of Racing exhibit.) If you’ve read our coverage from the National Sporting Art Museum and Library in Middleburg, Va., or visited the National Museum of Racing, know he got there before you and paved the way for you to learn from those sacred spaces.

A poem by Paul Mellon which he read at the Thoroughbred Club of America in 1975. This copy is part of a special exhibit about his life currently at the National Museum of Racing
For me, there’s a lot to like, and you’ll appreciate it all the more if you take a stroll through the special exhibit in Saratoga. My favorite part was the poem in the photo above, written by Mellon for a speech at the Thoroughbred Club of America’s honor guest dinner in 1975. How perfectly he captures a love for not just the sport, but the Thoroughbred, that so many of us share.