On Assumption Day last August important art news leaked from Moscow to Riga, from Riga to Paris, from Paris to the front pages of the U. S. Press. The news leak: Andrew William Mellon had bought Sanzio Raphael's Madonna of the House of Alba for $1,500,000 from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (TIME, Aug. 27).
Twenty-four hours later, the onetime Secretary of the Treasury broke off his grouse shooting at his lodge in Perthshire, Scotland long enough to deny the Moscow-Riga-Paris-U. S. news leak in the following words: "I have not bought the Alba Madonna or any other Soviet art. This story has cropped up recurrently for the past three years. Each time I have denied it."
In November another Mellon art story broke. The 79-year-old Pittsburgh multi-millionaire was supposed to be preparing to turn over all his pictures to a new public museum to be built either in Pittsburgh or Washington. Again Mr. Mellon came forth with a solemn, straight-faced denial:
"My collection of paintings eventually will be made available to the public. It is entirely unfounded that I have arranged to build an art gallery at Washington. I have engaged no architect, have caused no plans to be drawn and have made no commitments to build or endow a gallery at Washington, Pittsburgh or elsewhere."
Last week Mr. Mellon stood convicted in the public prints of some fancy fibbing about his art collection. He had bought the Alba Madonna from Soviet Russia, not for $1,500,000 as reported from Moscow but for $1,166,400, highest price ever paid for a single masterpiece. As long ago as 1931 he had started putting money into a trust fund to build a public art gallery in Washington. These facts were developed at a tax hearing in Pittsburgh last week (see p. 14). With the air of introducing a great patriot and generous patron, Frank J. Hogan, Mr. Mellon's astute Washington attorney, announced that his client had put $3,200,000 into his museum trust fund in 1931, that the Alba Madonna would go into that museum along with four other great canvases which Mr. Mellon bought from Moscow's Hermitage Museum for $3,247,695 and some 60 to 70 other masterpieces from his collection.
The Mellon collection has been assembled almost entirely through the New York house of Knoedler & Co. According to Lawyer Hogan, it is today valued at $19,000,000. Though generally assumed to be one of the finest private collections of old masters in the U. S., its complete make-up is still unknown to outsiders—largely because of Mr. Mellon's habit of issuing diplomatic denials every time the Press gets wind of a new acquisition. If and when the collection is publicly exhibited in a Mellon museum, students and critics will have a chance to view the following world-renowned treasures: