Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.

The Center was established by a gift from Paul Mellon (Yale College Class of 1929) of his British art collection to Yale in 1966, together with an endowment for operations of the Center, and funds for a building to house the works of art. 

The Center is affiliated with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, which awards grants and fellowships, publishes academic titles, and sponsors Yale's first credit-granting undergraduate study abroad program, Yale-in-London.

The collection consists of nearly 2,000 paintings and 200 sculptures, with an emphasis on the period between William Hogarth's birth (1697) to J. M. W. Turner's death (1851). Other artists represented include Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, Joseph Wright, John Constable, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Robert Polhill Bevan, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson.

Sculptors represented include Louis-Francois Roubiliac, Joseph Nollekens, Francis Chantrey, Jacob Epstein, and Henry Moore.

The collection of 20,000 drawings and watercolors and 31,000 prints features British sporting art and figure drawings. It includes works by Hogarth, Paul Sandby, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, John Constable, Samuel Palmer, Richard Parkes Bonington, John Ruskin, J. M. W. Turner, Walter Sickert, Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John, Gwen John, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

The Center's collection of rare books and manuscripts comprises 35,000 volumes, including maps, atlases, sporting books, and archival material of British artists. 

The four-floor Center offers a year-round schedule of exhibitions and educational programs, including films, concerts, lectures, tours, symposia, and family programs. It also provides numerous opportunities for scholarly research, including residential fellowships. Academic resources of the Center include the reference library (40,000 volumes) and photo archive, conservation laboratories, and a study room for examining works on paper from the collection.