Upcoming Exhibitions

The Golden Age in the Golden State: Dutch and Flemish Prints and Drawings from the Huntington and Crocker Collections

Dec. 5, 2009–March 29. 2010
Huntington Art Gallery, Works on Paper Room

During the 17th century, a period known as the Golden Age witnessed a great increase in artistic activity in the Netherlands. Over nearly a century of struggle—culminating in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648—the Protestant Dutch in the north won their independence from Catholic Spain. As the new Dutch Republic became more prosperous, its art market grew. Also at this time, Jesuits in the southern Netherlands (or Flanders) were building churches and commissioning art in an attempt to confirm the faith of Catholics. Both situations greatly influenced the political and economic life of the region, and art flourished. This intimate installation of 15 important works on paper displays biblical, mythological, and genre subjects by such masters as Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), and Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Organized together with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, this display is a fitting collaboration between institutions founded by Henry E. Huntington and Edwin B. Crocker— both men who helped bring the railroad to the West. The installation also complements several museum exhibitions relating to Rembrandt on view concurrently in Southern California.

A Clash of Empires: The Seven Years’ War and British America

Some 20 years before the shot “heard ‘round the world” initiated the War of Independence, other shots, fired in what is now southwestern Pennsylvania, literally set the world on fire. On May 28,
1754, a detachment of Virginia militia commanded by a young George Washington ambushed a party of French soldiers in the territory claimed by both France and England. Less than two months
later, French reinforcements surrounded the stockade hastily built by Washington’s men and forced their surrender. This skirmish triggered a chain of events that erupted in a conflict
known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years’ War and drew into its vortex all the European powers and engulfed the entire globe. “A Clash of Empires” examines the causes,
course, and consequences of the conflict through the eyes of its many participants, publicly displaying for the first time materials from the Huntington Library’s vast collections documenting this turning point in modern history.

The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs

The first major exhibition of furniture and decorative art by the American craftsman and designer Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936), “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” brings together more than 40 pieces from 10 museums and several private collections to survey Rohlfs’ career as a furniture designer. With roots in the Aesthetic movement and an artforart’s sake sensibility, Rohlfs’ style
relates to the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau but draws on precedents from Asian and Moorish as well as English and German designs. While his work influenced the pareddown
oak forms that became hallmarks of the Arts and Crafts movement, Rohlfs preferred the term “artistic furniture” to identify his designs not as part of a specific style or movement but rather as an expressive art made by a single individual. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chipstone Foundation, and the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation with new scholarship based on the Rohlfs family archives and newly discovered primary sources, “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” concludes its national tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 2010.