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The Huntington Art Collections

The Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of American Art

With the opening of the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery in 1984, American art became a significant part of the Huntington's collection. While Henry Huntington envisioned a collection of American art as early as 1919, his vision was not realized until sixty years later. In 1979 The Virginia Steele Scott Foundation made a major gift to the Huntington which included a group of fifty American paintings, funds to construct a gallery to display the collection, and an endowment for its professional management. Since the Scott Gallery opened, its collection has continued to grow, largely through the support of the The Scott Foundation.

The chronological arrangement of the Gallery's permanent collection traces the development of American art over three centuries. Period furniture and silver provide a domestic context for the paintings and sculpture. Visitors enter a display of art from the colonial period and the first years of the republic, and continue through groupings of works from the antebellum period, the post-Civil War era, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the central gallery, monumental paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries are complemented by furniture, silver, and sculpture.

In addition to special exhibitions, the Scott Gallery includes a permanent installation of works by the early 20th-century Southern California architects, Charles and Henry Greene, as well as other Arts and Crafts objects, organized in collaboration with the Gamble House (USC).

Selections from the Scott Gallery

Portrait of Pauline Astor, 1898-1899
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
oil on canvas, 98 x 50 inches
L1998.1
Lent by The William Morris Collection
©

On special long-term loan from The William Morris Collection, this painting is John Singer Sargent's largest and most impressive full-length portrait in a landscape setting. The subject of this work, Pauline Astor (1880-1970), was the eldest daughter of the American financier, William Waldorf Astor, who emigrated from New York to London in 1891. She is shown here at age 18, accompanied by her King Charles spaniel, Mossie. Although only in her late teens, and not yet married, this self-possessed and elegant young woman had become mistress of her father's estate, Cliveden, upon the death of her mother in 1894. The lyrical presentation of an elegant, full-length figure standing in a landscape provides rich opportunities for comparison with examples of grand manner portraiture in The Huntington's collection, from Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of Anne (Killigrew) Kirke (ca. 1637) and Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Jonathan Buttal, The Blue Boy (1770) to Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Jane Fleming, Countess of Harrington (1778-79) and Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Sarah Goodin Barret Moulton, known as Pinkie (1794).
More about the Portrait of Pauline Astor by John Singer Sargent

The Long Leg (1935)
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
oil on canvas, 20 x 30 1/4 inches
83.8.25
©

Edward Hopper is recognized as one of the most important American realist painters of the first half of the 20th century. As in The Long Leg with its simplified forms modeled by a strong light, his realism was tempered by a modern sensibility. Hopper's compositions often have an air of stillness and a pervading mood of solitude. That is as true for his evocative images of sailing--a recurring theme in his work--as it is with his stark depictions of urban life. Here, the graceful movement of the boat across the water expresses Hopper's attachment to the sea and his love of sailing even as it contributes to the picture's quietude. Like many New York artists of his generation, Hopper sought relief from summer in the city by going to the New England shore. The cool tones and sense of peace in this work offer a respite from the heat and grim of New York. The locale is Stage Harbor on the southeastern coast of Cape Cod, not far from the artist's summer home in South Truro.

Pandora (1858)
Chauncey B. Ives (1810-94)
marble, 65 inches
95. ©

Ives was born in Hamden, Connecticut. Like many European and American sculptors of the 19th century, he established a studio in Italy where marble and trained Italian carvers were readily available. The works produced were neoclassical in style because of the material, the idealized figures, and the frequent references to antiquity. Modeled in Rome, Pandora is a fine example of this kind of sculpture and the artist's masterpiece. The Scott example is one of three full-sized versions carved in the 1850s. According to the classical myth, Pandora was sent to earth to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods. Stirred by curiosity, Pandora removed the top of a box she was forbidden to open, releasing all the evils unknown to the world; only hope remained inside. Ives depicted the partially draped figure with bent fingers and flexed wrist, suggesting that she is on the verge of opening the box.

After the Hunt (1883)
William Harnett (1848-92)
oil on canvas, 52 1/2 x 34 inches
93.1 ©

One of the great American still-life painters of the 19th century, Harnett executed After the Hunt in 1883 during a four-year period of study in Munich. The meticulously rendered, life-size objects with their different textures contribute to the tromp l'oeil (trick the eye) effect of the composition. This painting is the first version of four depicting dead game and antique hunting gear hung as trophies on a wooden door. These large, compositionally sophisticated pictures marked a shift in the artist's style away from small, table-top still lifes. They also explore the relationship between the present and the past, here expressed through the contrast between the freshly killed birds and the antique instruments of the hunt that hang with them.

Sarah Jackson (c 1765)
John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)
oil on canvas, 50 x 40 inches
83.8.9 ©

Born in Boston and basically self-taught, Copley became the finest painter in the colonies. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, he left America for England and never returned. Copley was known primarily for his portraits. Sarah Jackson is a mature work of his American period. The daughter of a businessman and patriot, Sarah Jackson married in 1770 Henderson Inches, a successful Boston merchant. The textures and sheen of the sitter's dress demonstrate Copley's incredible ability for observation. Jackson's elegant figure and finery help establish her station in life as do the swag of drapery that frames her strongly modeled head and the marble urn on the right. In his portrayal, Copley effectively conveys the strength of his sitter's character as she gazes directly out at the viewer. The Huntington owns a major work from Copley's British career, Charles, Lord Western, and Shirley Western (c 1783).

Breakfast in Bed (1897)
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 29 inches
83.8.6 ©

Born in Pennsylvania, Mary Cassatt attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before going to Europe for further study. In 1873, she settled in Paris where she was to remain the rest of her life. A close friend of Edgar Degas, Cassatt became part of the French avant garde and embraced the tenets of Impressionism. With its broken brush strokes and bright colors, Breakfast in Bed reflects the artist's aesthetic ties. The subject of a woman and child is a recurring theme in her work and this particular example is an especially telling treatment of the subject. With the child centrally placed in an upright pose, Cassatt depicts a quiet but charged moment in which a mother embraces her daughter, whose attention is elsewhere. Contrasting the mother's protective action and gaze with her offspring's curiosity with the world beyond her reach, Cassatt evokes the subtle tensions implicit in the relationship of parent to child.

Chimborazo (1864)
Frederic E. Church (1826-1900)
oil on canvas, 48 x 84 inches
89.1 ©

Frederic Church was one of the leading American landscape painters of the 19th century and a key figure in the so-called Hudson River School, launched by his mentor, Thomas Cole, in the 1820s. Although Church frequently depicted the grandeur of American scenery, he travelled widely and his subjects ranged from icebergs in the Arctic to ancient ruins in the Mediterranean to the jungles of South America. Chimborazo is one of three monumental canvases that resulted from two trips Church made to Ecuador and Colombia in the 1850s. The others are: The Heart of the Andes (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Cotopaxi (Detroit Institute of Art). Together and individually, they present a sublime view of nature in all of its magnificence and reflect the ideas of the European naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote of the unspoiled beauty of South America. His writings were known to Church. Rich in detail, Chimborazo is not a topographically accurate view. Rather it compresses into one painting the various environments found in Ecuador--the high desert, the mountains, and the jungle.

In a Quandary or Mississippi Raftmen at Cards (1851)
George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879)
oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 21 inches
83.8.4 ©

Born in Virginia, Bingham moved when he was still a child with his family to Missouri, where he spent most of his life. Although he painted portraits as well as genre subjects, he was best known for his depictions of the boatmen who plied the Mississippi-Missouri rivers around St. Louis and for his visualization of grass-roots politics. In a Quandary is a small version of Raftsmen Playing Cards (St. Louis Museum) of 1847, and was painted for translation into a lithographic print by Goupil & Co. Although Bingham was conversant with the dangers of life on the frontier, in his views of flatboatmen he generally depicted how they passed their time as they moved slowly down river and emphasized their comraderie. Here, as in many of his paintings, the triangular arrangement of the figures gives a stability to the composition even as the receding lines of the boards on the deck contribute to the sense of movement.

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