This weekend, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino opens its newly expanded, refurbished and reinstalled galleries of American art. They give new emphasis to the second part of the institution's Anglo-American history.
The $1.6-million redesign is part of a larger project unveiled last May, when the beautifully restored historic mansion reopened to display the Huntington collections of European painting, sculpture and decorative arts. The mansion is home to the best Northern Renaissance painting in the Western United States, a svelte "Madonna and Child" (circa 1460) by Rogier van der Weyden. It's also where you'll find a dazzling full-length Flemish Baroque portrait of a noblewoman by Anthony van Dyck, plus the robust, larger-than-life mythological bronze of "Diana the Huntress" (1782) by French Neoclassical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.
Still, the Huntington will always and forever be identified with British art. (Even Van Dyck worked in London.) Railroad and real estate baron Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927) and his socially determined wife, Arabella (1851-1924) -- Henry's widowed aunt by marriage and the putative richest woman in America -- were smitten with England's landed gentry. Like many Gilded Age super-rich, they wanted to identify themselves as the American heirs to European aristocracy -- the Mother Country's privileged New World children.
If Henry and Arabella couldn't actually be a duke and duchess, at the very least they could own Thomas Gainsborough's iconic "Blue Boy" and hang Thomas Lawrence's extravagant "Pinkie" in the parlor. And so they did, building a great country house to hold a celebrated collection of British portraits and much, much more.
They also owned a few American paintings, especially the kind that would connect the United States to England.
A dramatic scene of King Lear with his daughter Cordelia, the moral hero of Shakespeare's play, is by the American expatriate Benjamin West, history painter to King George III. A full-length portrait of Revolutionary War hero George Washington -- wearing military dress and leaning on a cannon after the Battle of Princeton, his horse peeking his head into the scene -- copies a famous picture by Philadelphia's Charles Wilson Peale. Even an inlaid card table by the Franco-American cabinetmaker Charles-Honore Lannuier connects Gilded Age ideals with royal tastes: He brought a Neoclassical style of decorative arts favored on the Continent to New York in the Federalist period.
