Arabella Huntington: "Director of the Whole Enterprise"

“Mrs. Huntington, who has very good taste in such matters, is practically the responsible director of the whole enterprise.” With these words in 1891, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times described Arabella Huntington as she oversaw the remodeling of her New York residence on Fifth Avenue. More than a century later, the collections she assembled continue to bear witness to her ambition and remarkable achievements as a collector. 

As The Huntington approaches the 107th anniversary of its founding on August 30, the occasion provides an opportunity to reassess Arabella’s contributions to The Huntington’s art collections and to the history of American museums, restoring her to her rightful place among the great collectors of the Gilded Age. 

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.

Alongside developing her collection, Arabella began to cultivate relationships with living artists. Her first trip to Europe marked an important milestone in this process, when she sat for a portrait by Alexandre Cabanel, one of the most sought-after French society painters of the period. This commission marked the beginning of her patronage of contemporary artists, a practice she continued throughout her life. Over the following decades, Arabella continued to expand her collections while shaping the residences she maintained in New York, Paris, and later San Marino as carefully orchestrated artistic environments.

Arabella Huntington also recognized the growing importance of museums in establishing cultural prestige and public visibility. In 1884, she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a patron. After the transfer of Collis’s painting collection to the Metropolitan, she deepened her relationship with the institution through gifts and donations, becoming a Patron and Fellow in Perpetuity in 1906.  

In 1907, by the time Collis’s estate was settled, Arabella Huntington had both the financial resources and the independence to pursue collecting on an unprecedented scale. Competing with the foremost collectors of her generation such as J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, she acquired exceptional works, including Old Master paintings, Chinese porcelains, and eighteenth-century French decorative arts. 

Among the treasures Arabella acquired from leading dealers is an extraordinarily rare green celadon vase made in fourteenth-century China and later embellished in eighteenth-century Paris, now at The Huntington. By 1911, Arabella was also securing major British portraits for Henry, helping establish arguably the finest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Chief among these acquisitions were three of Gainsborough’s full-length portraits, purchased through Duveen, including his 1788 portrait of Lady Petre.

Around the same time, Arabella’s collecting activities became closely intertwined with Henry Huntington’s ambitious plans for his San Marino estate, today The Huntington. Arabella played an increasingly active role in planning the layout of the estate and its formidable collections. Correspondence with the British art dealer Joseph Duveen reveals that he followed her instructions in arranging the interiors and submitted design sketches directly to her. 

The San Marino residence, today the Huntington Art Gallery, evolved alongside the collections that Arabella assembled for it. In 1909, she secured a rare set of eighteenth-century Beauvais tapestries woven for Louis XV, the cost of which exceeded that of the entire mansion. The works were so important that the architectural plans for the library, originally intended to house Henry’s book collection, were altered to accommodate their monumental size, ultimately prompting the relocation of his growing library to a separate building and giving rise to what became The Huntington Library.

In the years that followed, Arabella Huntington continued to craft her public image through artistic commissions while forging an enduring institutional legacy. In 1917, she commissioned the sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy to create a bronze portrait of her, now at The Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Virginia. Shortly before her death in 1924, she also sat with Henry for portraits by the British artist Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley, now hanging in the Huntington Art Gallery. These commissions suggest that Arabella viewed portraiture as another way of self-fashioning and complementing the legacy she created through her collections.

On August 30, 1919, Arabella and Henry Huntington jointly signed the trust indenture that transformed the San Marino estate into a public institution now known as The Huntington, the legal act that made their private grounds and collections accessible to wider audiences. 

Arabella Huntington’s legacy has been obscured not only by the tendency to overlook the contributions of women collectors, but also by the circumstances that followed her death in 1924. Her collection was inherited by her son, Archer Huntington, and subsequently dispersed among multiple institutions, while her archives became fragmented and were partially lost. Unlike the collections of other prominent women collectors of the Gilded Age, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, which remain largely intact and are displayed in museums closely associated with their founders, Arabella Huntington’s collection is scattered across multiple institutions. Many of the objects she acquired are now either part of memorial collections established in her honor, such as the European art collection that Henry assembled in her memory at The Huntington or identified as gifts from her son. The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a telling example. Several paintings Arabella had assembled—including masterpieces by Rembrandt—entered the museum labeled as gifts from Archer Huntington in memory of Collis P. Huntington, leaving Arabella’s role as their original collector largely unrecognized.

More than a century after Arabella Huntington’s death, our understanding of her legacy continues to evolve through new research. Fully recognizing her achievements means acknowledging her rightful place among the great collectors of the Gilded Age. Arabella Huntington was not simply a patron of American museums, but one of the principal forces behind collections and institutions that continue to define the nation’s cultural landscape.