On graduating from Yale University, where he majored in English, in 1936, he took a year off and travelled throughout Europe and Asia studying art and architecture.

It was as a psychiatrist that he served in the US Army Medical Corps during World War II and later continued to practise on the staff of Columbia University, counselling foreign students, and at St. Luke's Hospital, New York.

[2] Dr Pratt's lifelong affection for animals developed into a passionate concern for their welfare, but, ever the moderate, he attempted to persuade rather than harangue the public and scientific establishment.

His commitment to animal welfare earned him the Albert Schweitzer medal, presented to him at the White House in 1981, and the Annual Award from the New York Humane Society.

One was of the world, with fat-cheeked wind-puffers, one of the western hemisphere with a cannibal’s ‘lunch’ dangling from a Brazilian woodpile, and the third depicted an upside-down Europe with south at the top.

[2] In the 1950s, Pratt and his partner John Judkyn became aware "that the media has helped to produce a distorted conception of the transatlantic experience and that the treatment of American history in British textbooks had tended to be scant and unbalanced.

Whilst touring museum-restorations in country settings in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, such as Winterthur, Dallas and John had the idea of creating a similar museum in Britain.

"At this stage", Dallas wrote, "my desire was simply to share with the British the aesthetic charm of early American furniture and decorative art and their historical background.

[11] The museum opened to the public in July 1961, and in 2011 celebrated its 50th anniversary with an exhibition of Marilyn Monroe's dresses and artefacts from the David Gainsborough Roberts' Collection.

Dr. Dallas Pratt and John Judkyn “were an Anglo-American couple, Partners in both their personal and collecting lives,” according to the website of the American Museum & Gardens in the United Kingdom, which the two men founded together.