Arts and Letters

Long before his death at eighty-five, Archer Milton Huntington was characterized by a well-known Spaniard as "the most famous and fervent Spanish scholar that our age has seen." Born in New York in 1870, the son of a celebrated railroad-builder and the heir of a large fortune, he had been attracted to everything Spanish when he was only eleven years old, at a moment when he learned to speak the language. He became interested while at Yale in the poem that we call, or miscall, The Cid, the great Spanish epic that he later translated, the most vivid picture in European literature of a mediaeval warrior, in this case the favorite hero of Spain. He was enabled to study, in the house of an old statesman in Madrid, the only ancient manuscript of this poem, which had never been allowed to leave the country except in the more careless days when George Ticknor was permitted to take it to Boston. As a student of Spanish literature, Huntington was the successor of Ticknor, as well as of Washington Irving, Longfellow, and Prescott.

He had first visited Spain when he was at Yale, in the company of his tutor, one of the professors, and this was the first of many journeys in which he explored the peninsula as a devotee of Iberian art and letters. His father, soon reconciled to Huntington's life-interest, said, "The only thing I ask is that you do a good job," and Huntington prepared for this by learning Catalan and Arabic as well as Old Spanish and Portuguese. He worked in many of the great libraries of Spain, discovering important manuscripts that had been forgotten, projecting already his paleographic edition of The Cid, which included the English translation and a volume of notes. This was well-received in Spain as a monumental work that was both accurate and brilliant. In his most pleasantly readable Note-Book in Northern Spain, Huntington described his travels through various regions to which he devoted so many of his own poems, sonnets, lyrics, dramatic pieces that celebrated Spanish scenes and men and women who were connected with the history of the country. When the government acquired the house of Cervantes, Huntington bought the adjoining houses in order to create, in the great writer's birthplace, a Cervantes museum, library, and print-shop. This was the first, or one of the first, of the public benefactions for which Huntington was also famous later.

He had long planned a center for Hispanic studies in the United States, and this took form when he finally established the Hispanic Society in New York in 1904. In the beautiful museum, so different from other museums—an embodiment in itself of the old Spanish world—he placed the great collections of Spanish books and works of art that he had been assembling in his travels. Among these were twenty thousand volumes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alone, with fine collections of manuscripts and paintings, early Spanish sculpture, architectural fragments and many examples of the various minor arts. There were statues and articles in silver, alabaster, ivory, textiles, embroideries, ceramics, metal-work, and brass, with seven paintings of El Greco, a fine selection of Goya, and works by all the other great Spanish masters. There were also thirty thousand coins of all historic periods from the Phoenician and Greek to the Spain of the present. The museum represented the long succession of cultural phases that have expressed the mind of Spain.

It can surely be affirmed that this country has never known a benefactor of his kind to compare with Archer Huntington. For the Hispanic Museum is only one of many that he established. He bought and built Audubon Terrace and all the buildings in it, a site that had formerly belonged to the great naturalist himself whose house stood a few yards from here, overlooking the Hudson from this "Minnie's Land." The American Geographical Society, the Numismatic Society, the Museum of the American Indian owed much to Huntington, who founded the Mariner's Museum in Virginia and the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina and who presented collections of art to San Francisco, Charleston, and Yale. He was the donor of the new building of the National Academy of Design, and it was he who founded and endowed the Consultantship in Poetry at the Library of Congress. It is to him we owe the generous endowment of this Academy, with the building, the music hall and the exhibition rooms; and it was he who provided the funds for the Howells and the Award of Merit medals—gifts that were all anonymous during his lifetime. As an example of what might be called imaginative munificence, Archer Huntington was certainly all but unique, and he deserves to be remembered with the great patrons of the ancient classic world and the Renaissance.