Volume 53, Number 17 · November 2, 2006
The Wealth of Loneliness
By Russell Baker
Mellon: An American Life
by David Cannadine
Knopf, 779 pp., $35.00
Why Andrew Mellon started buying so many fine paintings in his old age we can only guess, for he was not one to talk about the inner man. Maybe the lifelong loneliness in which he had wrapped himself finally became unbearable and the paintings provided a desperately needed sense of warmth and friendship. David Cannadine thinks it quite likely. At the end of his absorbing history of Mellon's emotionally stunted life, he finds it 'difficult to avoid the conclusion that the pictures Mellon called 'his friends and companions' were indeed a belated substitute for the genuine intimacies which he sadly never enjoyed.'
Review, 5104 words
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