The Huntington: Classy and Comfortable

This California museum is there to make new things grow — botanically, aesthetically, and intellectually.

T he Blue Boy, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1770, is shown in the grand painting salon at the Huntington in San Marino in California or, precisely, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. I think it’s as famous as Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, or Whistler’s Mother, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, Michelangelo’s David, and Warhol’s Gold Marilyn.

Gainsborough argued at the time that a portrait’s dominant color should be blue for coolness as opposed to using warm colors, so The Blue Boy might have been his manifesto. Few Georgian portraits, even by Gainsborough, are this blue, though, so from its debut to now, 250 years later, it startles viewers. Jacket and sleeve are made of slashes, long and short, of indigo, lapis, cobalt, slate, turquoise, and cream.

Gainsborough meant to stun. His competition was Reynolds, the revered painter of aristocrats, whose subjects looked well suited to the aura of the Greek and Roman gods he gave them.

Aura is one thing. The Blue Boy has sex appeal. Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse from 1783, also at the Huntington, looks like she intones from Mount Parnassus. The Blue Boy is Brad Pitt. The subject is probably Jonathan Buttall, not an aristocrat but a rich ironmonger’s son. He’s got the bad boy look — preppy, sexy, and naughty — and that’s part of its appeal. “Let’s play dress up,” he suggests, as he undresses us with that come-hither look.

The Blue Boy has star quality. It’s a celebrity picture in other ways, too. Henry Huntington (1850-1927) bought it in 1921 for $728,000, at the time said to be the highest price ever paid for a painting. I saw the painting last week when I visited the Huntington. It’s just been cleaned, and it’s dazzling, as a star should be. And it’s the centerpiece of the Huntington’s grand gallery of English aristocratic portraits by Reynolds, Raeburn, Lawrence, and Gainsborough.

I hadn’t been to the Huntington in about ten years. I wrote a big part of my dissertation there in the mid 1990s, when it was a plush, lush sleepy place, more famous for its gardens than anything else, though everyone knew The Blue Boy, and it was a draw. The Huntington’s superb library, filled with rare books and a manuscript collection, drew scholars. It’s in San Marino, a postage-stamp, WASP enclave of Pasadena, and like Darien or Old Westbury but with palm trees, cactus, and endless roses.

There’s always been a bit of fairy-tale weirdness surrounding the Huntington, a bit of Hollywood make-believe. Pinky (1794) by Thomas Lawrence, is at the Huntington, sharing a gallery with The Blue Boy. She just crosses the line to kitsch and could be a figure in a Disney movie.

How it has changed since my last visit. It’s still plush and lush, and it’s no less welcoming. I’ve always found it one of the most comfortable places to enjoy art. Its gardens are breathtakingly beautiful, now with a 13-acre Chinese classical garden with no equal outside China and Taiwan. There are lots of new buildings as the Huntington, through prodigious fundraising, added a nice, new space for its library, its fine and expanding American art collection, but they’re all discreet and set among flora and fauna. Visitorship is now at 800,000, double the 400,000 or so — many of them tourists — who came when I was a visiting scholar.

So many visitors brings a buzz, but the Huntington’s got an entrepreneurial, modern spark I’d never seen. It’s hosting, with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, a big show of bleeding-edge art called “Made in LA, 2020.” A program titled “Project Blue Boy” just finished, and I think it’s brilliant. For over a year, paintings conservators cleaned The Blue Boy in the gallery where it’s always been displayed. The gallery was open to the public so visitors could see the work as it happened, with good interpretation on what cleaning an Old Master painting entailed. All the while, the Lords and Ladies on the wall overlooked the job at hand. A good, overdue clean and spruce-up became a Happening.

I never thought of the Huntington as a place with sizzle, but the whole place has star quality. For all its brilliant garden color, the Huntington always seemed foreign to Southern California. Understandably, it seemed English and aristocratic or, at the very least, WASPy. Charming, yes, but like a World’s Fair pavilion or a 200-acre time capsule.

The Mansion, once Huntington’s 40-room manor house, is where the English paintings are displayed. It’s a French Renaissance Revival thing built around 1907 and decorated with Huntington’s art and old French furniture. In the past few years, it’s been renovated and, finally, retrofitted for earthquakes.

As art barons go, Henry E. Huntington was in a class of a rich, discerning, self-made few. Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, J. P. Morgan, Samuel Krens, Benjamin Altman, and Huntington’s uncle, Collis, each assembled collections in their lifetimes that rivaled European aristocratic collections built over generations. Their immense fortunes, ambition, good taste, and the stewardship by the likes of the Duveen Brothers firm of art dealers combined to empty salons and drawings rooms throughout Europe.

Huntington moved to California in 1892, first to San Francisco to run the family’s Western railroad business, and in 1902 to expand the trolley system in Los Angeles and to buy and sell land. In 1903, he bought a ranch in San Marino, where the Huntington now stands.

In 1913, Henry married Arabella Huntington, Collis’s widow. It’s not as weird as it sounds. They were the same age, Collis had died in 1900, and both Henry and Arabella were art lovers. After my mother died, my father married the widow of her nephew. Nothing I could do about it, and, on the plus side, there was no net gain of family members. At least Arabella wasn’t a grabby gold digger. She was as rich as her new husband.

Arabella’s son, Archer, established the Hispanic Society in New York as the home for his stunning collection of Spanish art, rare books, and manuscripts. In 1907, Huntington built the mansion with a grand staircase, using it for his growing rare-book library and his collection of British portraits. He intended it to be a museum one day. A year after he died, it opened to the public. Part of the Huntington’s fantasy feel comes from Henry and Arabella never quite leaving New York. They spent only a few months a year in San Marino. They were New Yorkers and had a big pad in the city they called home.

The museum’s mission is simple and was prescribed by Huntington in 1919: “to advance learning in the arts and sciences.” Huntington himself collected art, mostly British, and established the 130-acre botanical garden, now one of the world’s finest. It’s gorgeous, but it’s a serious horticultural asset. The Huntington’s rare books and manuscripts now number in the millions, and the library owns one of the twelve surviving Gutenberg Bibles and Benjamin Franklin’s handwritten manuscript of his autobiography.

Huntington was omnivorous, though buying only the best. That said, the strengths of the library are in English and American literature and history and in the history of science. The Huntington pays for fellowships for scholars working in the fields of anything it collects. Its library and research arms collaborate with Cal Tech, just down the road.

The Huntington, like the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, feels like a university in the depth of scholarship, but the three are run better than universities. All three are intensely quality focused and, not having students, alumni, or affirmative-action programs, can skip sports, socializing, and a high tolerance for mediocrity.

At the Huntington, everything is perfect, not perfect like Princeton, which is annoyingly perfect, but well done, beautiful, and thoughtful. It’s not an immense place and doesn’t have a big bureaucracy. Its operating expenses last year were $53 million. Its endowment at the end of last year was $535 million.

I’ll keep using the word “perfect” for the Huntington since its art collection is superb, though focused. Its manuscript collection rivals Yale’s, Harvard’s, and Oxford’s. The gardens, whether bonsai trees, prickly cactuses, or roses, are heavenly. Probably a better word is “equipoise.”

It’s not too big and not too small. From the top brass to the program staff to the gardeners, everyone seems invested in the success of every part of the place. Visitors feel welcomed. The mansion and museum are comfortable places. The Huntington has to raise 60 percent of its budget, not a huge lift, but enough of a fundraising need to keep everyone on their toes. Rich places grow lazy, entitled, and smug.

The Huntington is a classy place that treats its visitors and its donors well. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Huntington donor who feels the place abused his philanthropy. Many Huntington donors are refugees from LACMA, which, in my era, was Ground Zero for botched donor relations. Among the many gunshots LACMA fired at its own feet came at the expense of Frances Brody’s estate. The Los Angeles collector bequeathed $115 million to the Huntington in 2010 and what she called “the leftovers” to LACMA. LACMA, she felt, attended too much to living artists and to Eli Broad, the mercurial and irascible collector who, himself, later dumped LACMA.

When I first went to the Huntington, I was a student but, ingratiating as I was then, found lots of friends. I was going to Yale, and most of the Huntington big shots went to Yale, or to Williams or Amherst or Dartmouth. It was a tweedy place, tweed with a camellia boutonnière.

The Huntington had only five trustees and was inbred. For years, the place was a social hub for the San Marino and Pasadena WASP elite, in part because the Huntington didn’t push for money. When Bob Skotheim became the president, or chief executive, in 1988, he saw that the trustees had been dipping into capital to run the place, and then going back for seconds and thirds, all to obviate serious fundraising. Nothing could be WASPier than that! He’d been a college president and knew the place was on the road to fiscal damnation.

Things have certainly changed. Skotheim did serious fundraising but, aside from Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale art gallery, no one could raise more money than Steve Koblik, president from 2001 to 2014. Under his leadership, about $400 million came in, including the Brody pile. Koblik led the renovation and building boom and continued to make the Huntington financially stable and secure.

Today, Karen Lawrence is the president. Before coming, she served as president of Sarah Lawrence College, and she’s a James Joyce scholar. D. H. Lawrence called Joyce’s work “a clumsy lotta putrida stewed in journalistic dirty mindedness,” and though “Finnegan’s Wake” is very funny, I think he’s a writer for professors. He’s Irish, though, and I love Irish fiction. Lawrence makes sense of it, which shows she’s fluent in ideas big and obscure.

As a college president, she’d already been through the 2008 financial crisis. She had the grit to get the place through COVID, a mess made for Ulysses to navigate. Under her leadership, the Huntington opened the instant it could. Lawrence pushed the public-health plutocrats to allow the gardens to open first, as people in Southern California couldn’t be expected to stay locked in their homes. The Huntington is tourist-focused, and its financial model relies on tourists paying admissions. While it did have some layoffs, it seems to have weathered the storm.

The Huntington was already focused on a fair-pay and staff-diversity plan before last year’s big national museum eruption over racism and sexism. I’ve written about the Huntington plan, which is detailed, methodical, and sound. The place is in San Marino. It had a lot to do to make its staff-pay, evaluation, and promotion policies clearer and fairer, and it’s doing it. A big change starting this year involves the trustees. The Huntington board is expanding from five to eight members, and I think this will bring more voices to the table and diminish cliquish patterns.

I’ll write more about the Huntington when I review the “Made in LA 2020” exhibition. It’s not the first time the place has tackled contemporary art. It should, since it’s a place that values inquiry, and its American-art collection has many good things. It aims to cover the sweep of American art so the work of living American artists seems at home there. But, as I said, the Huntington is a place that’s classy and comfortable, and it’s a garden. It’s there to make new things grow — botanically, aesthetically, and intellectually.