Hispanic Society of America

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2001 by Alfred Mayor

Collis Potter Huntington created the Central Pacific Railroad and the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company becoming one of the richest men in the United States. With the same single-mindedness his only son, Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955), created the Hispanic Society of America, the richest repository of Spanish artifacts outside Spain.

With inexhaustible supplies of both money and enthusiasm Archer Huntington had the society's building constructed on Broadway and 155th Street in New York City and assembled its extraordinary collections between about 1890 and the end of World War I. In preparation for his first trip to Spain in 1892he immersed himself in the study of Arabic with a tutor and made himself familiar with surgical techniques should he come to harm in a remote part of Spain. Thoroughly versed in Spanish, he was preparing an edition of El Cid. His library of rarities already numbered some two thousand volumes, and his approach to collecting is touchingly evident in this report of an addition he made in 1891: "Another shoal of gleaming 1st Editions has swum into my ken: I have sat on the bank and baited my hook with little golden certificates for some time & cast near where I saw them last and, behold, bites!"

On the first of many trips to Spain, WI. Knapp, a Hispanist and professor at Yale University, accompanied him as his paid companion. The idea of his museum took shape slowly In 1898, six years before the Hispanic Society was founded, he wrote to his mother Arabella, an Olympic class acquisitor. "The museum.....must not be a heaping of objects from here or there or anywhere until the whole looks like an art congress--half dead remnants of nations on an orgy. .....I wish to know Spain as Spain and so express her--in a museum. It is about all I can do. If I can make a poem of a museum it will be easy to rend."

The result is a collection of more than 800 paintings, 6,000 watercolors and drawings, 15,000 prints, 1,000 works of sculpture, 6,000 decorative arts objects, 175,000 photographs, 250,000 books and periodicals (including 15,000 printed before 1701), and 200,000 manuscripts. Nonetheless, it is not a "heaping of objects," as the selection of more than 200 works from the society in this handsome book makes abundantly clear.

Spanish art, if a generalization can be made, appeals urgently to the senses, and more often than not to the sense of sorrow. A poignant example is a polychrome pearwood Mater Dolorosa by an anonymous thirteenth-century carver. As the commentary notes, "she stares fixedly almost hypnotically giving the impression of intense pain, accentuated by her partially opened lips." In truth, the more you look at her, the more she seems alive. On the happier side, but with the same realistic intensity, is Juan de Sevilla's painting of about 1660 depicting the Virgin and Child with angels. The Virgin, who appears to be a comely sixteen, offers a shapely breast to the naked child, while sin little angels concentrate on making themselves useful. Two hold up the curtain that frames the scene, one lays out the child's clothes, and three arrange flowers in his crib. It is an imagined domestic scenc that is entirely and immediately accessible to the viewer.

One of the great rarities in the collection is a painting by Sebastian Munoz of Marie Louise of Orleans, queen of Spain, lying in state in 1689. She is laid out in an open coffin that is placed on a richly dressed bed in the royal palace in Madrid. A bishop and his acolyte attend her, while courtiers in black robes emerge from the gloom on either side of the bed. Seven cherubs in sad poses sob, and in the foreground eleven huge candles burn fiercely in silver candlesticks as tall as a man, dwarfing one and all. It is a remarkably theatrical painting redolent of the same gloom that pervades the Escorial.

Equally dramatic, if far more enigmatic, is the portrait of the duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goyay Lucientes, which is probably the best-known painting in the society's collection. A detail of this work is shown on the book's cover (illustrated above). Goya has depicted her recently widowed at the age of thirty-five and pointing to the ground, where inscribed in the sand are the words "solo Goya" She wears two rings, one labeled Alba and the other Goya. The portrait dates from 1797, while Goya was spending eight months at her estate in Sanlucar de Barrmeda. Of the duchess a French visitor to Madrid declared: "every hair on her head elicits desire," but the meaning of the words in the sand and the "Goya" ring is unknown. Passion there was, undoubtedly but whether desired or requited we shall never know.

The library is the crown jewel of the society's collections, for Archer Huntington was passionate about books, whether acquired singly or swept up in bulk when he bought entire private collections. Among the manuscripts are some sin hundred letters patent of nobility (cartas ejecutorias de hidalgu in), which reveal yet another aspect of the Spanish character, These letters patent were issued by the king to certify the noble lineage of the recipient In a land of nuanced hierarchy these documents were enormously important to the recipients, and they lavished great care and expense on preparing them, from fine parchment to elaborate illuminations, and finally the best binding that money could buy One of them, issued by Charles V to Bartolome de Montoya in 1552, was illuminated by an unknown artist in Valladolid with exquisite miniatures depicting the triumphal procession of a Roman emperor and David slaying Goliath in addition to a robed woman blessing a kneeling man and woman. In the margins are flowers and b irds and grotesque masks. The relevance of these pictures, both pagan and Christian, to the letters patent is not apparent, but they are beautiful illuminations and undoubtedly ennoble the document Binders too were called upon to do their best. From Granada about 1573 came a binding by an anonymous artisan so encrusted with gold-tooled decoration that it is commonly referred to as cuajada. (curdled). It enclosed the letters patent for Pedro Ortiz de Ia Cerday de Esquivel y de Herrera issued by Philip II. The binding combines cameo busts, volutes of flowers and vines, and classical trophies of arrows, bows, drums, and helmeted warriors. In the very few crannies left behind are fleurs-de-lis, rampant lions, unicorns, dogs, and vases of flowers.