In Celebration of Paul Mellon, a showcase of the great philanthropist’s “most treasured works on paper,” is a fine collection of art by the great American, English, and French masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There isn’t much linking the pieces at this exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, save their common collector and a general tendency towards the restrained and the undramatic, but the collection holds quite a bit of interest in its disparate pieces.

Much of the artwork, particularly the earlier Europeans in the collection, has a pleasant, aesthetically understated aspect. Typical of this general mood is Samuel Palmer’s Harvesters by Firelight (1830). It is one of the earliest pieces in the collection, but could easily be mistaken for the work of an abstract Impressionist—Cezanne, for instance. A striking blend of oranges and yellows, swaying, stylized trees and a few heavily abstracted figures in the background (the harvesters themselves), set against a purple sky in that indeterminate period of time between day and night, give the scene a fairytale air of forgotten England.