Art Museum

The Art Museum features British, European, American, and Asian art spanning more than 500 years and includes more than 45,000 objects.

Extraordinary examples of decorative arts and folk art, paintings, prints and drawings, photography, and sculpture are displayed in the Huntington Art Gallery (the original home of Henry E. and Arabella Huntington) and in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Both buildings also showcase smaller, temporary exhibitions that focus on masterworks in the collection or place The Huntington’s historic works in conversation with contemporary artistic practice.

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.

painting of woman sitting on stool painting a canvas with drawing on the floor

Explore the Art Collections

Find information on tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and other works of art at The Huntington.

A person wearing an "Ask Me" badge talks to another person in front of a large hanging tapestry.

Free Art Spotlight Conversations

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.

  • European Art Gallery: Daily at 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., plus Saturdays and Sundays at 1:30 and 2:30pm. Meet at the Huntington Art Gallery Entrance.
  • American Art Gallery: Daily at noon and 1 p.m. plus Saturdays and Sundays at 2 and 3 p.m. Meet inside the Erburu entrance to the galleries across from the Conservatory.
The Making of There-Bound by Enrique Martínez Celaya

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.

A Conservationist carefully touches up a tiny part of the painting "Blue Boy."

The Blue Boy

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.

fabric quilt including busts of presidents

Support the Art Collections

Founded in 1994, the Art Collectors’ Council meets every spring to select works for acquisition presented by The Huntington’s curatorial staff. In November 2021, The Huntington acquired more than 50 important works of art by a wide range of artists contributing to a more expansive story of American art, adding hemispheric and global perspectives and diversity to the collection.

Art Exhibition Catalogs

nineteen nineteen book cover

Nineteen Nineteen

First prize, Museum Publication Design Competition, American Alliance of Museums

Nineteen Nineteen includes 275 objects from The Huntington’s collections, representing a pivotal year in the world’s history and the institution’s centennial.

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A gold leafed cover with stenciled writing of artist and book title that reveals The Blue Boy painting underneath.

Kehinde Wiley: A Portrait of a Young Gentleman

Richly illustrated with portraits by Kehinde Wiley and by such 18th-century masters as Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Hudson, this book offers insight into the evolving history of portraiture and the representation of power.

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A sailboat on gently rocking ocean waves.

Excursions of Imagination

This generously illustrated volume features landscape and figurative subjects by the acknowledged masters of the medium—J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, John Constable, and Henry Fuseli—as well as artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and such modernists as David Bomberg and Paul Nash.

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Exhibition Catalogue for "Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts"

Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts

Exploring Walt Disney’s fascination with European art, this publication features 40 works of 18th-century European design—from tapestries and furniture to Boulle clocks and Sèvres porcelain—alongside 150 film stills, drawings, and other works on paper from the Walt Disney Animation Studio Library and archives.

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Book cover for Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art.

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art

Becoming America offers a multifaceted view of one of the foremost collections of 18th- and 19th-century American folk and decorative art from the rural Northeast. Essays by leading specialists discuss the culture of furniture workshops, exuberant painted decoration, techniques of sewing and quilting, and poignant stories about the families depicted in the portraits.

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