The Huntington

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, known as The Huntington, is a collections-based educational and research institution. In addition to the library, the museum houses an extensive art collection, and the property includes 120 acres (49 ha) of botanical landscaped gardens.

The Huntington Art Gallery

The Huntington’s art collection has a focus on 18th- and 19th-century European art and 17th- to mid-20th-century American art.

The European art collection, consisting mainly of British & French paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts and is housed in the original Huntington residence.

The permanent installation also includes contains Italian and Northern Renaissance paintings and a significant collection of 18th-century French tapestries, porcelain, and furniture.

Turner, J. M. W. – The Grand Canal – Scene – A Street In Venice

The Huntington Library

The library building was designed in 1920 in the Mediterranean Revival style. The library contains a collection of rare books and manuscripts, concentrated in the fields of British and American history, literature, art, and the history of science.

The library’s holdings spanning from the 11th century to the present, and contain seven million manuscript items, over 400,000 rare books, and over a million photographs, prints, and other library material.

The Huntington has become one of the top institutions in the world for the study of the history of science and technology with a collection of over 60,000 items.

The Reeve in the Ellesmere manuscript (1410) of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

The Huntington Botanical Garden

The Botanical Gardens includes 120 acres (49 ha) of botanical landscaped gardens, showcasing plants from around the world. The Huntington has a program to protect and propagate endangered plant species. 

The gardens are divided into more than a dozen themes, including the Australian Garden, Camellia Collection, Children’s Garden, Desert Garden, Herb Garden, Lily Ponds, North Vista, Palm Garden, Rose Garden, the Shakespeare Garden, Subtropical and Jungle Garden.

The Camellia Collection includes nearly eighty different camellia species and some 1,200 cultivated varieties, many of them rare and historic.

The Rose Garden contains approximately 1,200 cultivars (4,000 individual plants) arranged historically to trace the development of roses.

The Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California

Highlights of The Huntington

• The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough
• Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence
• Madonna and Child by Rogier van der Weyden
• Vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible
• Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer (1410)
• Letters and manuscripts by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln
• The first two quartos of Hamlet
• The manuscript of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography
• Isaac Newton’s personal copy of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with annotations in Newton’s own hand
• Seven drafts of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
• The “Japanese Garden”
• The “Desert Garden”
• The “Chinese Garden” (Liu Fang Yuan 流芳園 or the Garden of Flowing Fragrance)
• A carnivorous plants selection

Thomas Gainsborough – The Blue Boy