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A Toast to Vesalius
Visitors to the Library’s permanent exhibition “Beautiful Science” can see an original plate from Epitome, then touch the copy, imagining how medical students of the time peered into the body. As...
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Lincoln’s Signature Accomplishments
Scene in the House of Representatives on Jan. 31, 1865. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Feb. 8, 1865. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. One hundred and fifty...
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What’s in Store?
The view as you enter the new Huntington Store. Photo by Tim Street-Porter. Anchoring the north section of the new Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center complex that opened in January is the...
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Buying a Turner
J.M.W. Turner, Neapolitan Fisher-girls Surprised Bathing by Moonlight, ca. 1840, oil on canvas. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Interest in the 19th-century British...
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Fantasy Aloe Hybrids
Zimmerman’s kind of six-pack: half a dozen aloe hybrids. On the bottom left is a young Aloe ‘Gargoyle’; on the bottom right is Aloe ‘DZ’. She’s waiting for the others to develop before she decides...
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Open to Interpretation
In the past, sumptuous furnishings may have tempted visitors to touch. Now, thanks to interactive displays—such as this one on the Savonnerie carpets—visitors can. One of the first things visitors...
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A California Garden
The San Gabriel Mountains form a backdrop to the Celebration Garden, with the new Mapel Orientation Gallery on the left and new café on the right. When the Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center...
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Let’s Get Oriented
The new Mapel Orientation Gallery offers historic and behind-the-scenes information on The Huntington, as well as a variety of imaginative things to see, hear, and smell. Did you know that the...
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Shakespeare Takes the Stage
Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in London in 1623. The poem on the left is by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow playwright. The...
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Tough Love for Roses
Less water, more blooms? The Huntington’s Rose Garden is more beautiful than ever, thanks in part to the smoky-red ‘Hot Cocoa’ roses (seen in the foreground), a hybrid by rose curator Tom Carruth. When...
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Taking the Long View
During an initial scouting trip, photographer John C. Lewis looked for locations that would most accurately recreate the original composition of panoramic photos made a century before. What happens...
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Worth the Wait
As part of periodic maintenance, the tea garden’s machiai or waiting bench received new rice paper to line its walls. Kyoto landscape designer Takuhiro Yamada consults his notes. Photo by Andrew...
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Small Hands at Work
Instructor Emily Earhart leads children through The Huntington’s historic Valencia orange groves to pick fruit. Photo by Deborah Miller. Huntington Explorers summer camp recently finished its 14th year...
View ArticleTurbulent End to Civil War
By the spring of 1865, when surrenders at Appomattox, Durham Station, and elsewhere had finally delivered an end to four years of bloody battle, the American Civil War had killed a staggering 750,000...
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Hear Ye, Hear Ye
Did you hear that The Huntington possesses an illuminated prayer book that fell from the hands of Mary Queen of Scots when she was beheaded in 1587? Or that the findings of German naturalist Alexander...
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Winter Blooms
While most of the country braces for freezing temperatures and snow, many people in Southern California welcome the arrival of winter as their favorite season. Nighttime temperatures rarely fall below...
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Bulbs and Roses
Earlier this month, a group of dedicated volunteers began the gargantuan task of pruning The Huntington’s more than 3,000 rose bushes. Hard pruning once a year keeps roses healthy and promotes...
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Art and the Garden Movement
The relationship between garden design and painting is the subject of “The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920,” on view Jan. 23–May 9 in the MaryLou and George...
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Evolution of a Van Dyck
A major U.S. exhibition on Flemish master portrait artist Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) opens today at New York’s Frick Collection. The Huntington has its own van Dyck story to tell. At its center is...
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Pruning, Kyoto-style
Kyoto-based landscape architect Takuhiro Yamada stood in The Huntington’s Japanese tea garden and gazed at the trees and shrubs near the Seifu-an teahouse. For inspiration, he closed his eyes and...
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Who Was Adah Isaacs Menken?
In a library collection as deep as the one at The Huntington, it’s not unusual for scholars to encounter items that propel them on new paths of research. That’s what happened recently to The...
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Into the Fold
One of The Huntington’s partner schools is Esteban E. Torres High School in East Los Angeles. Last month, students from their Engineering and Technology Academy visited The Huntington as part of a...
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Bee’s-Eye Views
While traveling in the Amazon region of Ecuador, award-winning photographer David Leaser had an epiphany. What if he could use a computer to help him capture images of the tiniest flowers on the...
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Top 10 Water-Wise Plants
You’ve heard the dire news about California’s drought. And you’ve been thinking about swapping out your lawn for water-wise plants. But if you’re used to traditional grass and ornamental plants, where...
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Mementos of Downton
If you’re one of the millions of people who watched the British period drama “Downton Abbey,” you might be craving a juicy story about a lord or lady right about now. “Downton” led viewers on a...
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China Rose
It’s easy to imagine that heritage roses—with names such as ‘Archduke Charles’, ‘William R. Smith’, and ‘Maman Cochet’—originated in England or France. But every repeat-blooming rose today traces its...
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Found in Translation
What does the 20th-century Arts and Crafts architecture of Americans Charles and Henry Greene have to do with the 17th-century Katsura Imperial Villa outside of Kyoto, Japan? For admirers of the work...
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Greene & Greene in Context
Some people may remember the exquisite furniture in The Huntington’s permanent exhibition about Arts and Crafts masters Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene. The space was just reinstalled...
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Seeing to It
Chicago-based collage artist Candace Hunter first started reading Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction as an undergraduate. Themes from Butler’s writing permeated Hunter’s work through the years and...
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Prized Succulents
The Huntington recently acquired a collection of rare succulents from the late Gerald Barad (1923–2016) of Flemington, New Jersey. Participants at the Philadelphia Flower Show knew Barad as the guy...
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Pittman and Maltzan’s Visual Synergy
Visitors familiar with the exuberant, colorful, and graphically complex works of Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman know not to expect something conventional. His new exhibition, “Lari Pittman:...
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Chinese Poetry, Painting, and Gardens
Sometimes an object comes along that has so many ties to an institution’s collecting areas, it’s hard for curators to pass it up. That’s what happened in 2014, when The Huntington acquired the Ten...
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Breathing New Life into Trees
Huntington arborist Daniel Goyette first investigated the two-story-high coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) near the Boone Gallery to address concerns that its growth had slowed. Soil was built up...
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Hearing NASA’s Earth-Science Satellites
As visual strategists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Dan Goods and David Delgado use art and design to explain science. Their newest project is the Orbit Pavilion sound experience, which...
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Caring for Camellias
The eastern side of the North Vista contains some of The Huntington’s oldest and most precious cultivars of camellia. William Hertrich, Henry Huntington’s superintendent of the gardens from 1903 to...
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#5WomenArtists in the American Collections
The history of art is peppered with tales of women artists who struggled to gain the same recognition as men. To shine a light on women’s artistic bounty, the National Museum of Women in the Arts...
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Big Bonsai? Not Really
For Kyoto-based landscape designer Takuhiro Yamada, the tea garden he designed in The Huntington’s Japanese Garden is a work in progress. Each year, he returns to check on its development and chooses...
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Five Lessons Learned in the California Garden
As you stroll through the Frances and Sidney Brody California Garden, you may find it hard to believe that, just a few years ago, the same space was used primarily as a walkway and parking lot. The...
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Learning Real Life Solutions to Civic Problems
Who will be the civic leaders of tomorrow and guide the decisions Los Angeles makes about infrastructure, transportation, homelessness, and other major issues? It may just be some of the high school...
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Hummingbird Case History
Before leaving the foyer of the exhibition “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” take a moment to examine two glass cases filled with tiny, exquisite hummingbirds...
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