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Over the next six years, Snowy served as the Mellon family’s live-in artist at their residences in Upperville, Virginia, Washington, DC, and New York City, as well as on Cape Cod and Antigua. In her watercolors, Campbell captured the colors, light, and ambiance of the very rarefied rooms therein.
Dream job that it was, Snowy nonetheless eventually gave her notice to Bunny when marriage and motherhood claimed her. Over the last half-century, the artist’s luminous paintings remained in the archives of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, on the Mellon estate in Virginia. This month, with the release of The Enchanting Interiors of Bunny Mellon: Paintings by Snowy Campbell (Rizzoli), they are published for the first time.
Being the Mellons’ New York City redoubt, their home at 125 East 70th Street was arguably more opulent than the couple’s other residences. Yet there was nothing showy about the eight-bedroom, 11,000-square-foot mansion, because it followed the template Mrs. Mellon had created. As Mr. Mellon once explained: “One of the most engaging features of all our houses is their friendliness. Major works of art live side-by-side with small objects of art, children’s drawings, and bronzes of favorite horses. Bunny’s quest for comfort and informality has been nurtured with care; a little natural shabbiness in an old chair cover is sometimes purposely overlooked.”
Bunny’s aversion to anything looking too new was duly noted by Truman Capote. In a 1978 interview with Time magazine, he reported that Mrs. Mellon always carried a small pair of scissors in her purse: “When things are looking a little too neat, she takes a little snip out of a chair or something so it will have that lived-in look.”
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