The Huntington, a Los Angeles-area cultural institution home to art museums, libraries and botanical gardens, has announced a gift to the art collection funded by the Huntington Art Collectors Council. Each year, a committee selects works for acquisition based on recommendations from museum curators.
This year’s collection includes a London view by 17th-century Dutch artist Thomas Wijck; an 1872 bust of a black woman bound by ropes by French sculptor and abolitionist Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; an early work by feminist artist Judy Chicago; and a 19-year-old painting by African-American painter, surveyor and lithographer Grafton Tyler Brown. a fin-de-siècle landscape; a scroll from the early 1800s by Chinese painter Zhao Yuan; and a tapestry by contemporary Kashmiri-British artist Raqib Shaw.
These gifts join an earlier 2025 gift to the institution from Deborah Last and Jay and Deborah Last Collections. These include sculptures by Henry Moore, Jacques Lipschitz, and Harry Bertoia; prints by Frank Stella and Andy Warhol; and works on paper from the 19th and early 20th centuries by Americans James McNeill Whistler, Henry Farrell, and John Sloan.
In addition, Huntington trustee Mei-Lee Ney donated eight works by Cuban-born American artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, the Huntington’s first visual arts fellow, to the museum, adding to the museum’s existing collection of the artist’s work. The gift spans Zelaya’s 25-year career, which includes painting, sculpture, mixed media, drawing and photography.
Below are five works donated to the Huntington Museum by the Huntington Art Collectors Committee.
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Thomas Wake (1616–77), View of the River Thames at Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Dayearly 1660s
Image credit: Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens. Digital image courtesy of Rafael Valls, Ltd.
This painting by Dutch artist Thomas Wijck (1616-1677) captures the pageantry of London’s Lord Mayor’s Day, a celebration that dates back to 1215. Known for his Italianate renderings of harbors and coastlines, Wake was born into a family of artists and was nurtured by his father. After a stay in Rome between 1640 and 1642, he returned to the Netherlands and became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem. He first visited England in the early 1660s and is believed to have lived there until shortly before his death in Haarlem. This is one of the few surviving paintings from London before the Great Fire of 1666. View of the River Thames in Westminster Provides an illuminating perspective on commercial and civic life in 17th-century London.
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Jean-Baptiste Carbeau (1827–1875), Why were you born a slave?1872
Image credit: Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens. Digital image courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery.
One of the most famous works by French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, this life-size bust shows an African-American woman dressed in rags and bound with ropes, her face and figure embodying a spirit of defiance. Carpeaux’s first time as a model Why were you born a slave? In 1868, slavery had been abolished only three years in the United States and more than twenty years in France, but slavery was still legal or tolerated in many other parts of the world. Although the work had an anti-slavery message, it is disturbing to read now because it is both sensationalistic and stereotypical. Nonetheless, it was so popular at the time that Carbo produced many versions in marble, bronze, and terracotta.
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Judy Chicago (b. 1939), pasadena lifeguard1970
Image credit: Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens. Digital image by Francis Baker, courtesy Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Artwork Copyright © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Created in 1970, this wall decoration is the first piece in Judy Chicago’s collection and combines her early minimalist sculptures with her later feminist work featuring vulva imagery. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago, who had a studio in Pasadena, was an important practitioner of “Finish Fetish” sculpture, a variation of California Minimalism characterized by brightly colored, high-gloss surfaces. (Chicago attended automotive school to learn how to apply the car paint she used in these works.) But while the sculptures of Finish Fetish artists like John McCracken were entirely abstract, the pieces in Chicago’s “Pasadena Lifeguard” series are O-shaped, as in Orgasm.
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Grafton Taylor Brown (1841–1918) View of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone from the observation deck1887
Image credit: Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens. Digital image courtesy of Dolan Maxwell.
Grafton Tyler Brown was one of several famous African American landscape painters of the 19th century. He was born in Pennsylvania to a family of free men of color and studied lithography in Philadelphia. After moving to San Francisco in 1858, Brown became a lithographer. In 1867, he opened his own printing company, GT Brown & Co., which produced maps and advertisements, as well as documentation of the mining boomtowns of California and Nevada Territory. In the 1880s, he sold his business and moved to British Columbia before returning to the United States and beginning a career as a landscape artist. In addition to the Grand Canyon painting, the Huntington Art Collectors Committee has gifted the museum a set of Brown’s hand-painted prints from 1875-80.
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Zhao Yuan, Looking for flowers in Heyangor Handsome third grade scholar,c. 1804
Image credit: Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens. Photo: Ken Adlard.
Created by Zhao Yuan, a Chinese artist active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the 33-foot-long scroll features a painting of a young scholar in a garden and more than 40 calligraphy inscriptions. As can be seen from the title, the subject of the painting is someone who wished to do well in the civil service examinations, while the scroll itself provides insight into the culture of Chinese officials at the time.
