RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.- The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents an exhibition paying tribute to one of the Virginia Museum’s most generous benefactors, ‘Gone Away’: Gifts from the Estate of Paul Mellon, is on view through July 7. The exhibition features a selection of works from Mellon’s last generous gift to the museum – a group of 42 British sporting paintings, 12 French drawings and 19 sculptures. Among them are paintings by George Stubbs, works by Stubbs’ followers Ben Marshall and James Ward, and drawings by Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. Animal sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye, Christophe Fratin and Count Stanislav Grimaldi are also included. “Paul Mellon, who died in 1999, provided the museum with six decades of advice and support and was a trustee longer than anyone else in the museum’s history – 40 years. He gave the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts more than 2,000 works of art, and made substantial gifts toward the construction of two additions to the museum’s building,” says Dr. Michael Brand, the museum’s director. “His support through the years helped immeasurably to make the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection and, indeed, the museum itself, what it is today,” Brand says. The exhibition is divided into five categories: horse racing, fox hunting, coaching and carriages, shooting, and bronzes and drawings. Malcolm Cormack, the museum’s Paul Mellon Curator, says Mellon often expressed his thought that British painting, especially sporting art, was underestimated in its own land.