In the current debate over naming our art museum after a local donor, another museum gift should be recalled. Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 22, 1936, Andrew W. Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, statesman and art collector, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his letter, which FDR received on Christmas Day, Mellon offered to build and endow a National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to which he would donate his entire art collection, consisting of many masterpieces from the Italian renaissance, plus iconic Flemish, Dutch, British and American paintings from the 15th century to the 19th century and 31 pieces of classical sculpture. The value of the whole gift is estimated at $80 million, or least $10 billion in today’s dollars. It may well be the largest gift ever made to a government from any single individual.

The gift came with one major restriction — that the gallery must not bear Mellon’s name, but be named simply the National Gallery of Art. In that way, Mellon said that he hoped his collection would act as a nucleus to attract other collections to form a great national art museum. His wisdom proved true; by the time the great Tennessee marble structure was completed and the Gallery was opened in March 1941, its director David Finley had already attracted the great Samuel Kress collection of some 400 Italian renaissance works and was well along in persuading Joseph Widener, Chester Dale and Lessing Rosenwald to give their collections to the National Gallery of Art. Hundreds of other donors have since given thousands of artworks to add to Mellon’s nucleus.

Andrew Mellon did not live to see his National Gallery of Art open to the public — free of charge as it is to this day. He died in August 1937 at the age of 82, just as construction of the gallery building was under way. Nowhere on the exterior of the West Building, as it is now known, does the name of Andrew Mellon appear. Nor does his son Paul Mellon’s name appear on the East Building of 1977, which he funded. Only inside the gallery buildings are to be found inscriptions recording the generosity of the Mellons, father and son. In 1952, Finley raised the funds to erect a modest memorial to Andrew Mellon, a simple fountain in a small park at the apex of the Federal Triangle across Constitution Avenue from the National Gallery. In monumental Washington, it is the only structure that bears the name of Andrew W. Mellon. And that is the way the great philanthropist wanted it.

David A. Doheny, Coral Gables