English furniture at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Magazine Antiques, June, 2003 by Geoffrey Beard

The distinguished collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, have been well known since Henry Edwards Huntington (1850-1927) established the museum in 1919 in what had been his house. The collection opened to the public on January 27, 1928, and our familiarity with it rests in part on the iconic nature of many of the major British paintings it contains -- Jonathan Buttall: The Blue Boy, by Thomas Gainsborough (see Pl. I), for example, and Sarah (Kemble) Siddons as the Tragic Muse of 1783-1784, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). The English furniture, by contrast, is less well known, for the first love of Huntington's wife, Arabella Duval Huntington (nee Yarrington; 1850-1924), was French furniture. (1) In fact, the library in the San Marino house was designed to hold important examples of French furniture, surrounded by a suite of Beauvais tapestries. Arabella Huntington is seated in a French armchair in the portrait of her painted in 1924 by Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley (1880-1952).

Although Henry and Arabella Huntington were not married until 1913, both were intimately involved in planning and furnishing the house, which was built by Myron Hunt (1868-1962) between 1906 and 1910. On December12, 1910, the London firm Partridge, Lewis and Simmons (now Partridge Fine Arts) supplied the Huningtons with thirty-five pieces of Chippendale and Adam style furniture, much of it actually dating from the nineteenth century or later. (2)

Among the fine period examples are two settees, two stools, and seven mahogany chairs formerly in the collection of Lewis Henry Hugh Clifford, ninth Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, and it is on one of the chairs from this suite that Henry Huntington is seated for his own portrait by Birley, painted, like that of his wife, in 1924. The frames of the settees (see Pls. II, VI) are fashioned with brackets at each corner and around the legs, and they exhibit spirited carving of acanthus leaves and animal heads and paws. The needlework upholstery, while early in date, is not original.

A large set of chairs was also purchased in 1910 from the perhaps more familiar art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen (1869-1939). They are attributed to the shop of the London cabinetmaker Giles Grendey (see Pl. XI), whose chairs often bear paper labels and ink inscriptions under the seat rails. A maker's mark--"WF"--is impressed on the back splat shoe of two of the chairs in the Huntington set, and two others bear labels inscribed, respectively, "Louise Cecilia Pearse" and "Miss Sophie Hall," possibly referring to onetime owners. A similar set, with openwork backs also in the form of shells, is at Stourhead, Wiltshire, and they maybe those bought from Grendey in 1746 by Henry Hoare II (1705-1785) (3)

Much of the Adam style furniture acquired for the upstairs bedrooms and sitting rooms was bought by Arabella Huntington (then Mrs. Collis P. Huntington) in New York City between 1906 and 1910 for the San Marino residence.

The nucleus of an English furniture collection was thus established early on, and many of the so-called "1910 items" have since acquired a reputation as important revival pieces. The Partridge firm and White, Mom and Company which, as a leading interior design firm, also supplied some revival furniture, were favorites with Duveen, who also provided the Huntingtons with most of their British grand manner paintings. The furniture was purchased knowingly as being "reproductions" and is well documented in the Huntington and Duveen Brothers records as to supplier and cost. (4)

There were, of course, some outstanding earlier pieces sent in 1910 from London. These include a pair of cabinets made about 1740 in the style of William Kent (1685-1748). The foliated ovals on the side doors of the base suggest the hand of the London carver William Hallett Sr. (c. 1707-1781), but the carving is somewhat flatter than his is typically. Whoever made them, the cabinets are major masterpieces from a great, if unidentified, English house. Most interesting is the late eighteenth-century cabinet on stand in Plates IV and IVa, which incorporates mother-of-pearl panels taken from a late seventeenth-century cabinet made in the East Indies for the European market. A precedent for this sort of reuse can be found in the seventeenth-century marquetry decoration built into a pair of commodes made in 1767 by John Mayhew and William Ince at a cost of [pounds sterling]237 15s. for Burghley House, Lincoinshire, where they remain. (5)

The splendid commode in Plate V, again sent by Partridge, Lewis and Simmons, is attributed to Pierre Langlois, the Paris-trained ebeniste who worked in London between about 1750 and his death in 1767. (6) It is one of a group of commodes of seemingly identical form, four (one dated 1763) of which are today in the Royal Collection. (7) The Huntington commode has on the underside of the top a chalk and pencil drawing of two flower stalks with crossed stems, apparently a preliminary drawing for the marquetry on the top. (8) The vase inlaid on the lid is a herald of neoclassicism.