The Collector: Bunny Mellon

The Collector06.04.2025

Rachel Lambert Mellon (1910 -2014), better known as Bunny, was a gardener, horticulturist and wife of billionaire philanthropist Paul Mellon. A close friend of Jackie Kennedy, she created the White House Rose Garden which still grows according to her plans.

Her aesthetic maxim was “Nothing should be noticed.” Gifted with an original eye, an exacting will, and considerable means she created in her 2000 acre Virginia farm a visionary collection ranging from French furniture, baskets, Shaker antiques, and weather vanes to one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces designed by Jean Schlumberger. She filled the library with some 3,500 rare historical manuscripts and books, dating from the 15th century, and 10,000 modern reference works.

She was an early champion of Rothko, playing a formative role in his inclusion in the National Gallery of Art’s first exhibition of Modern art in 1973 and once famously acquired fourteen Rothko paintings during a single studio visit, purchasing them un-stretched from the artist’s studio floor, finding them arrayed there, as she remarked, “like rugs”.

The couple’s impressive collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists was displayed casually throughout the Oak Spring estate. Above her fireplace she installed a Pissarro unframed like a thrift store find. A Braque was likely to be found among the gardening baskets and Van Gogh’s “Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves” (1889) hung above the bathtub until her death in 2014 where it joined the collection of the National Gallery of Art.

Image: Mark Rothko’s monumental 1954 canvas “No. 20 yellow Expanse” hanging alongside botanical paintings in the Oak Spring garden library.

Mark Rothko’s monumental 1954 canvas “No. 20 yellow Expanse” hanging alongside botanical paintings in the Oak Spring garden library.
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Works in the living room include (From L to R) Winslow Homer’s “Children on the Beach (Watching the Tide Go Out; Watching the Boats)” (1873); Georges Seurat, “Les terrassiers (Casseurs de pierres)” (1883); Camille Pissarro “Paysanne assise et chèvre” (1884); Diego Giacometti (horse on mantle); Paul Klee, “Mit dem Rad” (“With the Wheel”) (1923); and Georges Seurat “L'arroseur” (1883) and “Femme tenant un bouquet” (1882).
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Pissarro “Paysanne assise et chèvre” (1884) unframed above the living room fireplace.
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Elsewhere in the living room are works by John Frederick Peto (on door) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (bust), By the desk a tiny Ben Nicholson painting hangs below a misty landscape by the lesser-known Lennart Anderson. Above these works hangs a colorful Nicolas de Stael piece.
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Two works by the 20th-century French artist Madeline Hewes and a painting by Edwaert Collier hang either side of a doorway.
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The entrance of the main house at Oak Spring that has a painting of garden equipment by Roger de La Fresnaye from 1912–13.
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Paintings by Giorgio Morandi in a hallway nook.
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A tiny celestial gouache on card from 1952 by Rene Magritte titled L’'autre son de cloche, 1952 hangs in the stairway.
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A view of the library designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.
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A serene sitting area in the library, decorated with French furniture.
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A hardy orange tree flanks Oak Spring’s library.
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