The Hispanic Society of America is one of New York City’s greatest hidden-in-plain-sight institutions. Its grand building in upper Manhattan is rarely mentioned alongside the Met, MoMa or the Frick yet it houses a collection of some 18,000 works of art and historical objects and a library of more than 250,000 manuscripts and 30,000 early books. All come from – or relate to – Spain and its wider historical empire, which stretched from South America to the Philippines.
This extraordinary cache was the fruit of Archer Milton Huntington’s (1870-1955) obsession with the Hispanic imperium. In the 1880s this son of a railway magnate started the first of several trips to Europe and while most wealthy Americans tended to laud the art of France and Britain, Huntington became besotted by the culture of Spain. He learned the language – and Arabic too so he could understand the country during its Muslim years – and began to collect.
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