Why you should experience The Huntington Library in Los Angeles, California.
The Huntington Library is a scholarly institution where San Marino's estate character meets rare books, European and American art and botanical landscapes assembled across one of Southern California's great private properties.
Set along Oxford Road near Orlando Road and just steps from Katherine Emery Estate, the institution occupies 207 acres at the northern edge of San Marino, where broad lawns, mature tree canopies and garden precincts spread beneath the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Botanical landscapes cover 130 acres and divide the estate into more than a dozen major gardens, creating pronounced shifts between desert slopes, subtropical plantings, formal axes and East Asian garden architecture. The central grounds organize the encounter around the former Huntington residence, the Library and the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries, with long exterior routes repeatedly returning architecture to cultivated landscape. Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey's Beaux-Arts residence commands a formal approach across lawns and sculpture-lined vistas, giving the institutional campus a domestic architectural center inherited directly from Henry and Arabella Huntington's estate. The result is a scholarly complex whose mansion, library buildings, galleries and botanical collections preserve the scale and physical coherence of an early twentieth-century Southern California estate transformed for public culture.
What you should know about The Huntington Library.
The Huntington Library is best known for Henry E. Huntington's conversion of a private collecting campaign into one of the world's major concentrations of rare books and manuscripts devoted to British and American history and literature. Huntington began laying the foundation for the American holdings in 1911 through his purchase of the Elihu Dwight Church library, which brought Benjamin Franklin's handwritten Autobiography and the 1648 Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes of Massachusetts into his collection. That same year, bookseller George D. Smith secured a vellum Gutenberg Bible for Huntington for $55,000, more than twice the previous auction price for a printed book and a purchase that drew international attention to Huntington's ambitions as a bibliophile. Johann Gutenberg had produced the Bible 1455 as the first substantial Western book printed with movable type, and the Huntington copy is one of three surviving vellum copies in the United States. Huntington accelerated the scale of his acquisitions in 1917 by purchasing the Bridgewater Library for $1 million. That collection had accumulated through three centuries of family ownership and contained 4,400 printed books and between 12,000 and 14,000 manuscripts, including Shakespeare folios and quartos that crossed the Atlantic packed inside 101 wooden crates. Its greatest literary object was the Ellesmere Chaucer, an elaborately illuminated manuscript of The Canterbury Tales created between 1400 and 1405, containing portraits of 23 pilgrims and preserving the most complete surviving version of Chaucer's work. The Library's early printed holdings subsequently grew to more than 400,000 books from the hand-press era, including more than 5,000 incunabula and copies of more than one-third of known English editions printed through 1640. Its wider holdings now extend to 12 million items, carrying Huntington's early pursuit of entire private libraries into a research collection of exceptional chronological and disciplinary range.
Henry and Arabella Huntington developed an equally consequential art collection around British portraiture and the transformation of their San Marino residence into a gallery. Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, painted 1770 and first exhibited at London's Royal Academy that year, became the collection's most famous acquisition after art dealer Joseph Duveen purchased it from the Duke of Westminster and sold it to the Huntingtons in 1921. The $728,800 purchase represented the highest price paid for a painting at the time and prompted Duveen to arrange exhibitions at London's National Gallery and his New York showroom before the canvas departed for California. Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie, painted in 1794, joined The Blue Boy within a British collection that eventually became one of the strongest outside the United Kingdom. Henry and Arabella's residence became the Huntington Art Gallery in 1928, placing the paintings inside the house completed for them in 1911. The collection expanded beyond eighteenth-century Britain into Italian, French and Netherlandish art, and the former residence now contains 1,200 European objects spanning the fifteenth through early twentieth centuries. American holdings developed on a separate scale across 31 galleries, extending from colonial painting and decorative arts through photography, film and contemporary work. The Blue Boy entered another chapter between September 2018 and March 2020 when Christina O'Connell led its first major technical examination and conservation treatment in public view, stabilizing paint, cleaning the surface and removing later varnish and overpaint. The combination of celebrated British portraiture, an intact Gilded Age residence and later expansion across European and American art turned the Huntingtons' private collecting into an art museum whose breadth now reaches far beyond the paintings that first gave the estate international attention.
How to fold The Huntington Library into your trip.
The Huntington Library works as the anchor for a daytime outing tracing the San Gabriel Valley from mission-era industry through Pasadena's Arts and Crafts architecture and into one of Southern California's major art collections.
Begin at El Molino Viejo, the gristmill Father José María de Zalvidea designed for Mission San Gabriel in 1816 as grain production placed new demands on the mission economy. The original two-story adobe and masonry building measured 53 by 26 feet and operated for seven years before a more efficient mill was constructed closer to the mission in 1823. The Kewen family acquired the property in 1858 and adapted the building as a residence, adding large windows and a patio during two decades of occupancy. Henry E. Huntington purchased the property in 1903 and later used the old mill as a golf clubhouse, adding another chapter to a structure whose survival reaches back to the mission period. Continue to The Gamble House, commissioned in 1907 by David and Mary Gamble and designed by brothers Charles and Henry Greene during the most celebrated period of their Pasadena practice. Construction began in March 1908, and the 8,100-square-foot residence was finished in January 1909. Greene & Greene conceived furniture, lighting, rugs, fireplace fittings, metal hardware and built-in elements alongside the architecture, extending their authorship deep into the house. Their collaboration with master builders Peter and John Hall drew upon the brothers' command of woodworking and the Halls' construction skill, producing the highly integrated craftsmanship associated with Greene & Greene's mature work. The residence remains the only Greene & Greene house open to the public with all of its original furnishings intact. Conclude at Norton Simon Museum, whose institutional history began with the Pasadena Art Institute in 1922 and passed through the Pasadena Museum of Art before financial pressure surrounding its new Ladd & Kelsey building brought Norton Simon into negotiations with its trustees. Simon had spent decades acquiring European painting, modern art and South and Southeast Asian sculpture, purchasing more than 8,000 works during his lifetime and circulating parts of the collection through his “museum. He assumed the Pasadena museum's financial obligations and management in 1974, combined its holdings with his own collection and reopened the building in March 1975; the Norton Simon Museum name followed that October. Frank Gehry renovated the interior galleries between 1996 and 1999, and landscape architect Nancy Goslee Power subsequently remade the sculpture garden. The collection now comprises 12,000 objects, including three Rembrandt portraits, six paintings by Van Gogh, more than 100 works by Degas and South and Southeast Asian sculpture spanning 2,500 years. The progression moves from El Molino Viejo's mission-era grain economy through Greene & Greene's integrated Arts and Crafts design and culminates in Norton Simon Museum's fusion of a Pasadena modern-art institution with an internationally significant private collection, connecting three major chapters of the San Gabriel Valley's cultural development.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
