Best known for his imagery of animals and people, particularly African and Native Americans, rendered in Abstract Figurative and early modern styles, Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) was one of the first African American artists in California to achieve a national reputation. He worked as a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist, but is best known as a sculptor.
Bringing together works from Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others, "Face to Face" will juxtapose Flemish and Italian works in thematic groupings, exploring the form of the diptych, the depiction of the face of Christ, the evolution of portraiture, elements of landscape painting, and the virtuosic rendering of forms and textures.
The Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West present an innovative, web-based digital exhibition with more than a dozen authors, critics, and scholars curating photographs from the 70,000-strong Southern California Edison archive at The Huntington.
The Cottage Door (ca. 1780) is one of Thomas Gainsborough's most famous paintings. The idealized scene of rustic country life was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, but both the subject and the composition continued to haunt the artist, and he repeated the design twice during the course of the decade.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, historians, bibliophiles, and collectors turned ordinary books into extraordinary "illuminated palaces"—repositories for original art, prints and engravings, maps, autograph letters, and the excised pages of other, more famous books.
This exhibition of 11 prints from The Huntington's collections complements "Revisiting The Cottage Door: Gainsborough's Masterpiece in Focus," and explores the question of whether an artwork is "by" its purported maker when it is a print.
"When They Were Wild: Recapturing California's Wildflower Heritage," showcases more than 300 items—drawings, paintings, herbarium specimens, photographs, and other objects—that trace the journey of California's plants from the flower fields into the home garden.