The Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive: A History
Beginnings
The Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) Photographic Archive was established in 1964, under the aegis of the Centre’s predecessor institution: the Paul Mellon Foundation. It sat at the heart of Centre activities for the next thirty years, at its height creating in excess of 3,000 new images each year;1 accounting for half the staff and a fifth of the entire annual operating budget.2
The aim of the Foundation was to “advance the knowledge and understanding of British Art”.3 It had been established following conversations between Paul Mellon, a wealthy philanthropist and avid collector of British art, and his picture adviser, Basil Taylor. Together they had identified that scholarship in the field was woefully underdeveloped and had inaugurated the Foundation as a means of addressing this issue. The Foundation’s Articles of Association set out three general means by which it would pursue this goal: promoting research, providing editorial services, and disseminating information.4 In practice, these general aims were distilled into three key activities: publishing books, awarding grants, and the development of a photographic service.
Aim and Scope
The photographic service supported all Foundation initiatives but ultimately the images produced from this activity were to be harnessed for a photographic archive that would—in due course—serve as an important resource in the field. Looking to the Courtauld Institute’s Witt Library for inspiration, the aim was to establish a parallel resource that focused specifically on British art. Essentially, the Foundation pursued the declared policy of “providing a phototheque raisonné in the manner of the Rijksbureau in the Hague, rather than an uncritical assembly of everything called British”.5 Recognising that the Tate Gallery had made itself “responsible for creating a photographic and archival record of the art of this century”, the focus was to be on works dating from the medieval period until 1900.6 Keen not to replicate images, the initial emphasis was on new photography of works.
Footnotes
- PMC3/3, Paul Mellon Centre, Annual Report, 1973–1974.↩︎
- PMC3/9, Paul Mellon Centre, Decennial Report & Financial Analysis, 1979–1980.↩︎
- PMC1/1, Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Bollingen Foundation for British Art.↩︎
- Ibid.↩︎
- PMC3/3, Paul Mellon Centre, Annual Report, 1973–1974.↩︎
- PMC3/4, Paul Mellon Centre, Annual Report, 1974–1975.↩︎
