The Huntington

Railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington and his wife Arabella began assembling this San Marino estate in the early 1900s, and it opened to the public in 1928, a year after Huntington's death. The institution combines a research library, an art museum, and roughly 120 acres of botanical gardens under one endowment.

The art collection centers on 18th and 19th-century British portraiture and includes The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, painted around 1770 and long considered the centerpiece of what one historian called the finest group of eighteenth-century British portraits ever assembled by a single collector. American paintings from the 17th through mid-20th centuries round out the galleries.

The library side holds manuscripts and rare books dating to the 11th century, with particular strength in British and American literary and scientific history, while the gardens outside range from a desert collection of cacti to a formal Japanese garden.