At a 1959 lunch in London, the art historian Basil Taylor convinced the 52-year-old American multimillionaire Paul Mellon that British art was "needlessly neglected, undervalued, and that somebody ought to do something about it". By the time coffee arrived, Mellon later wrote, "It was agreed that I was going to collect British art and Basil would be my adviser".

Mellon was already a great Anglophile. His love of the English countryside developed as a child, with memories of "flotillas of swans on the Thames, dappled tan cows, golden summer clouds and the grass green, green, green". When he went to the University of Cambridge from Yale, he discovered fox-hunting and horseracing, passions that lasted a lifetime and spurred his interest in paintings by Stubbs.