By his own admission, Paul Mellon (1907–99) was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He saw that as both an advantage and a disability. His extraordinary legacy is being variously celebrated on the centenary of his birth in June.

That Mellon didn’t gag from the impact of that silver spoon is a tribute to his ability to liberate himself from a cold and distant father — Andrew Mellon, who served as secretary of the Treasury under three presidents, and founded Washington’s National Gallery of Art — and a mother who left her much older husband when her children were still quite young. Forgiven by his father for admitting that “my mind was not attuned” to the management of financial institutions, Mellon embarked on a wholly different lifestyle that combined the perks of great wealth (hunting, racing) with the development of benefactions that have staggeringly enriched public culture in America and Britain.

It’s worth considering Paul Mellon not only for what he has given us, and for the celebratory exhibitions taking place this year at the National Gallery of Art, Yale Center for British Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, but also in relation to the new mega fortunes about which we read daily. The first generation of money-makers often are not the ones who develop the philanthropic impulses that frequently become the primary interest of their heirs. But the question is whether the Paul Mellon model is even viable in a world of absurd art prices, museum policies that devalue the stability of permanent collections, and the mad trotting around — at this very moment — from Venice to Basel to Kassel to Münster in search not so much of art as of novelty.

That may be the best reason to visit the Yale Center for British Art, where “Paul Mellon’s Legacy: A Passion for British Art” (until July 29) presents a collector whose focus was based on more than the art market. Mellon admits in an amazing film, which recently made its premiere at the National Gallery, that he took pride in buying works such as George Stubbs’s “Pumpkin With a Stable Lad” (1774) — a sublimely simple and beautiful depiction of a racehorse — at what turns out later to have been an exceptionally low price. But his devotion was to creating a collection with both depth and breadth, including both recognized masterpieces and obscure works, paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, and books that would describe the range of British culture in ways unrivaled even in Britain. After New Haven, the exhibition will be shown at London’s Royal Academy.

Mellon’s love for Britain is probably better traced to his student days at Cambridge than to his English mother. The great British portraitists such as Reynolds and Gainsborough have long formed the core of various American collections assembled early in the 20th century, including the Frick and Huntington, as well as the great urban public museums. But Mellon’s focus on British art was much more subtle, encompassing artists we seldom see, such as Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–28), whose brief life and beautiful works almost place him in the category of a Mozart or Schubert.

Our culture has so long worshipped at the altar of Italian art as the highest of Western culture’s achievements, that we need occasionally to be reminded of other important traditions. Because of its important ongoing scholarship and publications since Mellon’s 1966 gift to Yale, and its 1977 Louis Kahn building, which remains a masterful architectural statement, the Center for British Art has played an important role in rebalancing our understanding of the range of earlier art traditions.

While he said “collecting creeps up on you,” Mellon also was very assertive in stating that he had “not collected in order to hoard.” For that reason, the National Gallery of Art continued to be a major focus, as he supplemented his father’s munificence with a continuing string of gifts that continue to look extraordinary, even in the context of that national treasury. Why, for example, are the wax models for Degas sculptures in Washington and not in France? Because they were part of Mellon’s bequest to the National Gallery of Art. But this 1999 bequest was less grand than we might imagine, precisely because Mellon gave so many gifts of art during his lifetime. Indeed he said he had “commissioned only one great work of art” — the gallery’s I. M. Pei-designed East Wing (opened in 1978), one of Washington’s rare public buildings to break away from the ponderous Beaux-Arts architectural tradition that still defines too much of the capital city. It’s unlikely that this building could have been built by any other federal institution at the time, which is a tribute to Mellon’s foresighted partnership with J. Carter Brown, the Gallery’s charismatic director. And it’s almost impossible to imagine Washington as a venue for radically new contemporary architecture today.

Aware of the “devastating effects” of immense wealth, Paul Mellon’s persona hovers somewhere between pride at his public achievements and humility at putting forward his projects more than himself. “Power never appealed to me” he says in the warm biographical film portrait. “Privacy is the most valuable asset that money can buy.” Always the amateur — the true lover of those fields in which he engaged, Mellon appears to be such an anachronism today, although he only died in 1999. It’s not just his public benefactions — museum gifts, publishing support, foundation resources which continue to this day — but his persona that want to be revisited in this centenary year of his birth.