The Huntington’s British and European art collection encompasses a broad range of styles, cultures, and media, from antiquity to the 20th century, featuring one of the most significant collections of British art outside the United Kingdom.
The Huntington is home to 31 galleries of American art, ranging from the early Colonial period to the present and representing painting, sculpture, photography, film, decorative arts, architecture, and textiles.
The Asian art collections at The Huntington are heterogenous, ranging from small collections of Chinese export wares to rare Chinese books and paintings and Japanese ceramics.
Find information on tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and other works of art at The Huntington.
Take a 15-minute deep dive into a single work of art with a docent in the galleries. Offered free with general admission or Membership. Times vary depending on docent availability.
The artist explains how he wove together the stories of California highways, migratory birds, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and a searing self-portrait into a sprawling but cohesive work.
“Borderlands” is The Huntington’s permanent collections installation that explores American art through themes of place and migration. The first piece most people encounter, before they even reach the gallery doors, is Enrique Martínez Celaya’s There-bound. This avian mural, painted directly on the glass inside the gallery’s north entrance, is an exploration not just of the physical “skin” of the building, but of the border land between interior and exterior.
One of the most iconic artworks in British and American history, The Blue Boy, painted around 1770 by English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), was purchased by Henry and Arabella Huntington in 1921 for $728,000, the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time. By bringing this British treasure to the United States, the Huntingtons imbued an already well-known image with even greater notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic.
