‘Bunny’ Mellon botanical art goes on display at NYBG in October

For the first time ever, more than 50 works owned by Rachel “Bunny” Mellon – many never shown in public before — will be exhibited, at the Art Gallery of the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, Sat., Oct. 8 to Feb. 12.

Mellon was an aristocrat who grew up with and married into wealth, but she is remembered best as a significant American horticulturist and art collector who began her lifelong love of gardening at age 5.

By the time of her death at 101, she had amassed thousands of works of botanical art ranging from engravings and watercolors to works on paper and canvas, and more than 10,000 rare and scholarly books — all housed in the specially built Oak Spring Garden Library at her family home in Upperville, Va.

The works to be displayed at the NYBG includes such artworks as rare hand-colored engravings by French artist Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues, watercolors on vellum by German artist Georg Dionysius Ehret, and 19th- and 20th-century works on paper and canvas by artists including Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

Information: www.nybg.org.