Despite being charged with tax violations, Andrew Mellon determined to make his art collection a gift -- the National Gallery of Art, below -- to the American people. Click photo for larger image.
Click photo for larger image. "MELLON: AN AMERICAN LIFE" By David Cannadine Knopf ($35) Related coverage Son kept Mellon's memories alive Book review: 'Andrew Carnegie' Authors appearing here

In its understated elegance, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., seems to stand apart from its neighbors on the Mall.

The gallery's collection of classical art displayed in the intimate coolness of its galleries is removed from the bustle of the other museums around it. Because of its name, it's logical to believe the federal government established the place. Few of its visitors know that one man, Pittsburgh millionaire Andrew W. Mellon, was its creator.

By the time he offered his holdings to the American people in 1937, along with a building to display them, he was the country's major art collector. It was a determination undeterred by a hostile federal government then prosecuting (perhaps persecuting) Mellon with a dubious tax case involving the very charitable arm he set up to transfer his art to the nation.

Mellon did not want his name affixed to his gift, as so many wealthy have done. It was a rare public gesture of generosity by a man who devoted most of his life to building a private fortune. He died months after making his gift and four years before his gallery opened.

In commissioning British historian David Cannadine to write this full-scale biography, son Paul Mellon strove to restore the financier and treasury secretary under three presidents to his rightful place in the history of the early 20th century.

Today, it seems clear, after reading Cannadine's extensive effort, that it is the wealth that Andrew Mellon gave, rather than made, that is his essential contribution to American society. His accomplishments as Pittsburgh's major venture capitalist in the early 20th century and his tenure at the U.S. Treasury, the longest of any secretary, are at best distant memories.

Mellon's life, as described by Cannadine, is far less interesting than his art gallery, and no matter how many facts and figures the biographer shovels at his readers, he can't invest this dour Scots-Irish Presbyterian banker with many qualities we'd find interesting.

A writer who can't allow even a scrap of his research to go to waste, Cannadine wrote a book in itself with his extensive account of Mellon's determination to create a national art gallery. The inclusion of 16 pages of Mellon's artworks, impressively reproduced in color, make this point emphatically.

Cannadine provides the dates, time, places and the prices, always negotiated downward by the tough-dealing Mellon as he acquired his extensive, multimillion-dollar collection. His first mentor was Henry Clay Frick, another hard-headed Pittsburgh millionaire whose own art holdings were among the nation's best.

One of the sources tapped by the capitalist was the Hermitage, Catherine the Great's treasure house of valuable art that the Soviet Union looted in the early 1930s for cash. Mellon paid $7 million ($90 million in today's dollars, claims Cannadine) for 21 paintings, including works by Titian and three by Raphael, in deals he and the Russians kept secret.

As these purchases show, the pragmatic Mellon worked with anybody, including Communists, to get what he wanted.

Turning 80 in 1935 and in ill health, Mellon focused his attention to the future of his collection and gave over his final years to the gallery project.

It cost $15 million when it opened in 1941, and its planning had been closely overseen by its creator. He wanted "an inviting succession of intimate, restful, almost domestic little chambers" for visitors, the shading of exterior marble to ease the glare of the Washington sun and a central dome that was initially opposed by a government arts commission.

Mellon got his way, as he usually did.

His father's generosity did not impress his son, Cannadine points out. He saw the National Gallery as "one more investment, one more tremendous Mellon Interest."

Paul had good cause to be cynical. When he asked his father to give him two insignificant paintings from his boyhood home, Andrew was happy to sell them to him for $50,000 to skirt gift taxes.

Mellon initially wanted paintings as part of his decorating scheme for his new house in Pittsburgh, where he brought his British bride, Nora McMullen, 22. The marriage was one of Mellon's few unwise decisions, ending in scandal and a highly publicized divorce in 1912.

Cannadine neglects no aspect of his subject's life, painstakingly accounting for Mellon's complicated business dealings, his powerful political influence in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania and his competent stewardship of the Treasury Department at the height of Republican laissez-faire economic policies of the 1920s.

Cannadine leaves little doubt that the financier put business ahead of ethics while Treasury secretary, securing favorable conditions for his various companies and continuing to direct their activities.

Like so many, Mellon was baffled by the Great Depression, forced to give up his Treasury post as conditions worsened, then sent to the political sidelines as the Democrats, led by Franklin Roosevelt, took control after 1932.

Mellon was singled out -- unfairly, Cannadine claims -- as the prime example of the kind of greedy capitalist responsible for the crash and indifferent to the suffering of the poor. The Roosevelt administration charged him twice with tax violations, with little consequence, but Mellon would not live long enough to see his vindication.

The cynical FDR, who had used Mellon as a political foil, then eagerly accepted his "enemy's" generous gift without a word of apology. He would preside over the National Gallery's opening ceremony, broadcast coast-to-coast on radio, on March 17, 1941.

Tapping into the character of his subject, Cannadine writes in a formal, almost sere style that delivers the facts like a bookkeeper's ledger with little latitude for elaboration.

Born in 1855 to Thomas and Sarah Jane Mellon, king and queen of Pittsburgh's closed society of hard-working business leaders, Andrew hewed to his father's money-driven philosophy at the family bank. Until he married at 45, the dutiful son lived at his parents' Highland Park home and spent most of his days "acquiring and accumulating."

Andrew's younger brother, Richard, was his closest business partner, the two becoming wealthy on their various investment schemes that created such key Pittsburgh corporations as Gulf Oil, Alcoa, Koppers and Mellon Bank.

His business style and Republican Party loyalty made him a logical choice as secretary of the Treasury when President Harding took office in 1921, bringing this secretive and private man into the uncomfortable public eye, where he would stay for the rest of his life.

Cannadine has handled his charge conscientiously, yet indiscriminately. His attempts to interpret this tightly repressed man are often lost in the barrels of facts and figures that make up the public life of Andrew Mellon.

It's the soul of the man that piques our interest and that remains beyond Cannadine's grasp.