Hispanic Society of America.

Collis Potter Huntington created the Central Pacific Railroad and the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company becoming one of the richest men in the United States. With the same single-mindedness his only son, Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955), created the Hispanic Society of America, the richest repository of Spanish artifacts outside Spain.

With inexhaustible supplies of both money and enthusiasm Archer Huntington had the society's building constructed on Broadway and 155th Street in New York City and assembled its extraordinary collections between about 1890 and the end of World War I. In preparation for his first trip to Spain in 1892he immersed himself in the study of Arabic with a tutor and made himself familiar with surgical techniques should he come to harm in a remote part of Spain. Thoroughly versed in Spanish, he was preparing an edition of El Cid. His library of rarities already numbered some two thousand volumes, and his approach to collecting is touchingly evident in this report of an addition he made in 1891: "Another shoal of gleaming 1st Editions has swum into my ken: I have sat on the bank and baited my hook with little golden certificates for some time & cast near where I saw them last and, behold, bites!"

On the first of many trips to Spain, WI. Knapp, a Hispanist and professor at Yale University, accompanied him as his paid companion. The idea of his museum took shape slowly In 1898, six years before the Hispanic Society was founded, he wrote to his mother Arabella, an Olympic class acquisitor. "The museum.....must not be a heaping of objects from here or there or anywhere until the whole looks like an art congress--half dead remnants of nations on an orgy. .....I wish to know Spain as Spain and so express her--in a museum. It is about all I can do. If I can make a poem of a museum it will be easy to rend."

The result is a collection of more than 800 paintings, 6,000 watercolors and drawings, 15,000 prints, 1,000 works of sculpture, 6,000 decorative arts objects, 175,000 photographs, 250,000 books and periodicals (including 15,000 printed before 1701), and 200,000 manuscripts. Nonetheless, it is not a "heaping of objects," as the selection of more than 200 works from the society in this handsome book makes abundantly clear.

Spanish art, if a generalization can be made, appeals urgently to the senses, and more often than not to the sense of sorrow. A poignant example is a polychrome pearwood Mater Dolorosa by an anonymous thirteenth-century carver. As the commentary notes, "she stares fixedly almost hypnotically giving the impression of intense pain, accentuated by her partially opened lips." In truth, the more you look at her, the more she seems alive. On the happier side, but with the same realistic intensity, is Juan de Sevilla's painting of about 1660 depicting the Virgin and Child with angels. The Virgin, who appears to be a comely sixteen, offers a shapely breast to the naked child, while sin little angels concentrate on making themselves useful. Two hold up the curtain that frames the scene, one lays out the child's clothes, and three arrange flowers in his crib. It is an imagined domestic scenc that is entirely and immediately accessible to the viewer.

One of the great rarities in the collection is a painting by Sebastian Munoz of Marie Louise of Orleans, queen of Spain, lying in state in 1689. She is laid out in an open coffin that is placed on a ...