Art Museum
Art Exhibitions
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.
Explore the Art Collections
Find information on tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and other works of art at The Huntington.
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.
Highlights from the Collections
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.
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.
News and Features
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.