Past Exhibitions

The Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West present an innovative, web-based digital exhibition with more than a dozen authors, critics, and scholars curating photographs from the 70,000-strong Southern California Edison archive at The Huntington.

The Cottage Door (ca. 1780) is one of Thomas Gainsborough's most famous paintings. The idealized scene of rustic country life was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, but both the subject and the composition continued to haunt the artist, and he repeated the design twice during the course of the decade.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, historians, bibliophiles, and collectors turned ordinary books into extraordinary "illuminated palaces"—repositories for original art, prints and engravings, maps, autograph letters, and the excised pages of other, more famous books.

This exhibition of 11 prints from The Huntington's collections complements "Revisiting The Cottage Door: Gainsborough's Masterpiece in Focus," and explores the question of whether an artwork is "by" its purported maker when it is a print.

Rare examples of early American needlework offer new insight into the lives and skills of the young women who made them.

"When They Were Wild: Recapturing California's Wildflower Heritage," showcases more than 300 items—drawings, paintings, herbarium specimens, photographs, and other objects—that trace the journey of California's plants from the flower fields into the home garden.

The works in this exhibition—studies and sketches spanning nearly three centuries—provide glimpses into how artists such as Peter Lely, Charles West Cope, and David Wilkie attempted to capture the emotive force of the human hand.

To mark San Marino's centennial year, The Huntington has mounted a special exhibition titled "Cultivating California: The Founding Families of the San Marino Ranch," on view Feb. 16–May 13. The exhibition tells the story of the Wilson, Shorb, and Patton families, who helped transform a region of one-time Spanish land grants into an agricultural paradise.

"Maurice Merlin and the American Scene, 1930–1947" brings together approximately 30 paintings, watercolors, and prints by Merlin, as well as nine works by others in his circle, to shed light on the vibrant Detroit art scene in which Merlin worked while employed by the federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In a dramatic departure from tradition, The Huntington presents the first exhibition of contemporary paintings and sculpture to be displayed inside the Huntington Art Gallery, showcasing the work of Los Angeles–based artists Lesley Vance and Ricky Swallow.

This exhibition features fifteen rarely seen works by marine artists such as John Thomas Serres, Charles Bentley, and Samuel Owen. From documentary records of important battles to dramatic, romantic views of wind-tossed ships, the images reveal a nation passing from the threat of war to command a prosperous peace.

A Strange and Fearful Interest is drawn exclusively from The Huntington's collection of photographs related to the Civil War, offering an unprecedented opportunity to bring this rare and evocative material to light.