AFA 20th Anniversary

20th Anniversary 88 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com most important art collections of her era, which included Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy . Archer Milton Huntington’s life-long passion for Hispanic culture began with the purchase at age twelve of George Borrow’s The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841). For the next two decades he dedicated himself to the study of Spanish art, history, and literature, all the while collecting books, manuscripts, and photographs. Following the death of his father in 1900, he started acquiring paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and antiquities, with a view to placing them in the public museum and library he envisioned. In 1904, Huntington founded the Hispanic Society of America and acquired land in Upper Manhattan, on Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, now known as Audubon Terrace. A Beaux-Arts building for the museum and library was completed by 1906, and opened to the public in 1908. Over the Fig. 4: Anonymous, Cuzco School, The Presentation in the Temple, Peru, 1700s. Oil on canvas, 37¾ x 40⅛ inches. Hispanic Society Museum & Library (LA2190).