Roman statuary and Renaissance door-knockers, maps of the world and mortified saints; Easter parade penitents and bloodied, polychrome Christs, souls in torment and two sunbathing girls on the sand, slick with water, their bums catching the light.
In 1882, when Archer M Huntington was 11 and on his first family trip to Europe, the adopted son of American railroad baron Collis Potter Huntington found a volume on Spanish Gypsies in a Liverpool bookshop. His interest was piqued. “Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,” the boy wrote in his diary. Later on the trip he visited the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris, and he returned home to New York with the idea of creating a museum devoted to the arts of Spain and Latin America. What a strange origin story this is.
