The Yale Center for British Art is an American Anglophile’s mecca.

If you’re dying for a chance to study British art and culture, you may be surprised you don’t have to travel farther than the Northeast to get your fix. Thanks to Paul Mellon, the Yale Center for British Art opened in 1977, and it is the largest museum outside of the United Kingdom that is devoted to British art. Founding museums is part of the Mellon family heritage. Paul is the son of another famously rich guy, Andrew W. Mellon, who had begun the foundations for the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. When Andrew died, Paul took over and saw that task through. But Paul must have thought, “Why stop there?” 

The Yale Center for British Art’s collection began four decades before the museum opened to the public. Mellon’s upbringing and family connection to the United Kingdom inspired his fascination. In 1936, Mellon purchased his first example of British artwork, Pumpkin with a Stable-lad by George Stubbs. He started seriously collecting in the late 1950s, and amassed an impressive collection rather quickly. In 1963, Mellon had enough objects to present the collection in an exhibition at the  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Although notoriously snide, the British actually liked the exhibition and felt that it was representative of their arts and cultural history.

Mellon continued to flesh out the collection until the museum opened in the late 1970s. Today, the collection includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and rare books from the Elizabethan period onward. Mellon developed his collection by being flexible with what he purchased. The collection represents British artists, as well as European and American artists who lived and worked in the UK. No one’s judging.

From its inception, the Center for British Art was meant to be a place for learning, as well as a place to experience exhibitions. The Center’s architect, Louis I. Kahn, baked the institution’s academic nature into the architecture of the building. Kahn was no stranger to Yale University, or to designing art museums. Kahn’s first teaching gig was at Yale in 1947, and just a few years later he designed one of his first buildings – the Yale University Art Gallery, conveniently located just across the street from the Center for British Art.

The media covered the museum’s eight-year renovations that cost $33 million to basically maintain Kahn’s original look, but other, more controversial news stories have arisen since. When the museum reopened to the public in 2016, Titus Kaphar's work Enough About You debuted. Kaphar created this work in response to a 1719 portrait of Elihu Yale, an early benefactor of the university, in a group of people that includes an enslaved child. No longer relegated to the margins, Kaphar’s work centers the child, removes his silver collar, and adjusts his gaze so that he directly confronts the viewer. Kaphar also crumples the other men surrounding him. Kaphar’s work has inspired a long-term research project to understand more about this group portrait.