Arabella’s painting collection alone demonstrates the extraordinary quality of her collecting. It featured outstanding works by Renaissance Italian masters such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, by leading figures of the Dutch Golden Age, including Rembrandt and Vermeer, and by the foremost English portraitist of the eighteenth century, Joshua Reynolds. Her collection also held works by Goya and Velázquez, two of the most celebrated artists in Spanish history, which later passed to her son, Archer M. Huntington. The collection she assembled left a lasting imprint on several major American institutions, including The Huntington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Unlike many prominent collectors of the Gilded Age, Arabella Huntington did not come from established wealth. Born Arabella Worsham in 1850, probably in Alabama, she was raised largely in Richmond, Virginia. Following the death of her father, her mother supported the family by operating a boarding house.
As a young woman, Arabella probably began a relationship with Collis P. Huntington while he was still married. During this period, she gave birth to her son, Archer, whose paternity has long been the subject of speculation. Arabella married Collis Huntington after the death of his first wife. Arabella was thirty-four years old; Collis was sixty-three. With his financial support, she began investing in real estate and demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of property, finance, and social advancement that would later prove invaluable in the art world.
In 1900, following Collis’s death, Arabella inherited a substantial fortune, making her one of the wealthiest women in America. She remained a widow for thirteen years before marrying Collis’s nephew, Henry E. Huntington, in 1913. Both relationships attracted considerable public attention—first because she likely began her relationship with Collis while he was still married, and later because she married his nephew—and have often dominated accounts of her life, eclipsing her extraordinary accomplishments as one of the foremost collectors of the Gilded Age.
For Arabella Huntington, collecting art was not simply a matter of taste; it offered a way to establish social and cultural legitimacy in a society where family pedigree remained a powerful marker of belonging. In the early 1880s, she began to demonstrate her talent for creating sophisticated artistic environments when she transformed her house on West 54th Street into one of New York’s most fashionable artistic interiors, which included her celebrated Dressing Room, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Through close observation of the collections and collecting practices of her contemporaries in the United States and abroad, Arabella gradually developed her own approach to collecting, cultivating relationships with leading art dealers and amassing artworks of exceptional breadth and quality. Her frequent travels to Europe gave her opportunities to encounter some of the most important private collections of the period. On July 13, 1887, her name appears in the visitors’ book of Hertford House in London, then home to Sir Richard Wallace’s renowned art collection and today the Wallace Collection.
