The Bunny Mellon Collection

In partnership with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, de Gournay announces a collection of hand-painted wallpaper and hand-painted porcelain that pays homage to Rachel ‘Bunny’ Lambert Mellon and her enduring legacy at the Oak Spring Garden Library in Upperville, Virginia.

The first collaboration of its kind, the Bunny Mellon Collection for de Gournay draws from the unparalleled collection of important books, manuscripts, and artworks relating to horticulture, landscape design, botany, natural history, and the decorative arts, all acquired by Mrs. Mellon and now housed within the Oak Spring Garden Library. Each design within the collection carefully honours Mrs. Mellon’s inimitable eye, while wholly reflecting the extraordinary artistic skill and technical mastery of de Gournay’s craft.

An accomplished garden designer, horticulturist, and philanthropist, Mrs. Mellon devoted her life to the study and creation of art and beauty. Her impeccable sense of style, paired with her reverence for craftsmanship, continues to inspire generations today.

‘As a true legend of American design, it is a remarkable opportunity for us to be immersed within Mrs. Mellon’s incredible world at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation,’  says Hannah Cecil Gurney, de Gournay’s Director.  ‘Her passionate and unwavering patronage of the arts and the handmade resonates deeply with our own dedication at de Gournay to the finest artisanal handcraft.’

Delicately painted and embroidered by hand, the designs within the collection speak to Mrs. Mellon’s lifelong curiosity with the natural world. The collection looks not only to the library’s works by renowned botanical artists such as Charles Germain de Saint Aubin, Julius François de Geest, and Abraham Munting that were so influential in Mrs. Mellon’s own horticultural pursuits, but also to the gardens, plants and flowers, and the surrounding Virginia landscape that she diligently cultivated at Oak Spring Garden for over sixty years.

ESPALIER

Mrs. Mellon was well-known for her love of fruit trees, painstakingly growing many varieties of apple and pear as sculptural espaliers and cordons at her home, Oak Spring. Against a hazy blue-sky ground, ‘Espalier’ pays homage to the striking candelabra forms of the expertly trained specimens found to this day within her garden. As a clever trompe l’œil device, mouldy apples, tangles of cobwebs, and fallen pears left to rot on the grass are dotted throughout the scene, speaking to Mrs. Mellon’s dichotomous approach to garden design that marries a natural insouciance with meticulous control.

Many of the fruits incorporated into the design are life-like renditions taken from the illustrations in ‘Fruits from the Gardens of Summer Hill’ by Sarah Matilda Parry in 1828, a manuscript that Mrs. Mellon acquired in 1966.

FLORILEGIUM

‘Florilegium’ combines the colourful botanical illustrations of some of Mrs. Mellon’s favourite artists within the Oak Spring Garden Library, including Julius François de Geest, Charles Germain de Saint Aubin, and Domencio Buonvicini.

With layers of gently unfurling pages pinned back with faux brass tacks, the hand-painted wallpaper’s trompe l’œil effect evokes the feeling of thumbing through Mrs. Mellon’s library, delicately turning the pages of her various manuscripts to reveal some of her favoured wildflowers - cornflower, poppy, and blue flax among them. The wallpaper ground features her signature pale blue that has been striéd by hand to emulate the look of one of the decorative finishes employed throughout Oak Spring.

MISS GOUGH

Twisting and sprawling over a bamboo trellis, the creeping vines, leafy gourds, and vividly-coloured flowers of India in ‘Miss Gough’ recall the watercolour drawings of a young English woman in Madras in the 1840s. The album, which Mrs. Mellon purchased in 1963 and is now housed within the Oak Spring Garden Library, includes naive depictions of a variety of Indian plants found within the Gough family’s garden, which we have interpreted in vibrant contrast against a Yellow Ochre-painted Xuan paper ground. The trellis design draws from the trompe l’œil bamboo seen within the Oak Spring Formal Greenhouse, providing an architectural framework to the wild and dynamic plant life.

HORTUS MEDICUS

‘Hortus Medicus’ references a set of eight 17th-century oil on canvas paintings acquired by Mrs. Mellon in the 1970s at the suggestion of her friend Hubert de Givenchy. The artworks, depicting striking renditions of mandrake, Carline thistle, common aloe, and other medicinal plants, originally hung in an apothecary in the Loire Valley that was saved from destruction during the French Revolution. Portrayed at a monumental, larger- than-life scale with hovering insects and butterflies to animate the scene, many of the plants have exposed roots and bulbs, likely the artist’s way of hinting at their medicinal applications. To mimic the thick impasto look of the original canvases, this design is hand-painted using layers of matte and opaque paints and then lightly sanded and distressed to further enhance the darkened, timeworn feel.

LE BON JARDINIER

Whether simple rolled-rim terracotta pots, Versailles-style box planters, or hand-crafted teak barrels, Mrs. Mellon’s unerring vision for her garden - and preference for mixing the grand with the humble - extended all the way to the containers. ‘Le Bon Jardinier’ portrays an exuberant parade of pots arranged in clusters across a unified plane, evoking the greenhouse at Oak Spring Garden, where pots laden with spring bulbs, pelargonium, and topiary are brought in and out of the garden with the changing of the seasons.

Hand-painted upon an Antique White Xuan paper, this design replicates the exact planters found throughout the garden or from the highly-detailed engravings of monumental potted plants by the 17th-century botanical artist Abraham Munting housed within the Oak Spring Garden Library.

THE GLASS GARDEN

A charming study of some of Mrs. Mellon’s favourite things, this wallpaper brings together hand-painted replicas of the beloved baskets within Oak Spring’s Basket House and the everyday objects found throughout the Fernand Renard mural in the Formal Greenhouse. The motifs are then coupled with renditions of naively-painted flowers in glass vases taken from a mid-18th-century manuscript by the artist Cornelius Markee, now conserved at the Oak Spring Garden Library. Arranged in a totemic style, the overall simplicity of the design emphasises the unique, humble beauty of each individual flower stem or humble object. This silk ground wallpaper is offered with additional raffia hand-embroidered accents for further dimension and a hint of trompe l’œil.

PORCELAIN

To honour Mrs. Mellon’s penchant for collecting porcelain, de Gournay created three dinner service designs that are entirely hand-turned and hand-painted in their studio in Jingdezhen, China. The ‘Oak Spring’ porcelain dinner service borrows its depictions of flowers from the work of Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin, artist of King Louis XV, found within the Oak Spring Garden Library. Framed by an outer rim of exuberant floral sprigs and a basket weave-patterned inner rim, each hand-painted and finely detailed central flower can be chosen from a range of over fifty different species - many of them Mrs. Mellon’s favourites - including poppy, geranium, and nigella.

Named after the 17th century manuscript Jardin des rares et curieux fleurs by Francois de Geest from the Oak Spring Garden Library, ‘Le Jardin Curieux’ is a simple and airy design that reflects Mrs. Mellon’s more relaxed approach to dining. Large-scale renditions of hand-painted flowers, such as passion flower and sweet pea, are loosely arranged along the rim, encircled by a delicate brown-painted double band.

The Bunny Mellon Collection launched with a dreamlike garden celebration at Oak Spring Garden beautifully orchestrated by Gregory Blake Sams Events.

Surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of Oak Spring Garden, guests were immersed in the spirit of the first of its kind collection, with variations of the ‘Espalier’ design hand-painted on linen tablecloths and a rendition of the crabapple arbor delicately suspended above as a bespoke canopy. The evening also marked the debut of the collection’s porcelain pieces, each thoughtfully designed to reflect Mrs. Mellon’s enduring curiosity about the natural world.

With thanks to our contributors:

Atelier KH, Doorman Designs, Fibreworks, Gregory Blake Sams Events, John Derian, Les Indiennes, Raoul Textiles, Vaughan.

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The Bunny Mellon Collection