Image: Jan Brueghel the Elder, A Still Life with a Tazza, a Garland of Flowers, and a Jewelry Box, ca. 1620. Oil on panel, 19 x 26 1/4 in. Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors’ Council, with additional support from the Adele S. Browning Memorial Art Fund. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has announced five additions to its Art Museum collection, covering roughly five centuries and four media: painting, ceramics, sculpture and tapestry. All five were bought with funds from the institution's Art Collectors' Council, a group that backs purchases proposed by the museum's curators and is marking its 32nd year in 2026.
The painting in the group is a floral still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder from about 1620. Roses, carnations, marigolds, pansies and other blooms ring a gilded tazza, set among pearls, a Japanese lacquer box and objects made from materials of the Americas, which the museum reads as a picture of the period's global trade. It is the first European floral still life to enter the collection and is slated to anchor the Dutch and Flemish galleries of the Huntington Art Gallery once they are reinstalled.
Older still is a maiolica charger made by a workshop in Deruta, Italy, between about 1505 and 1520. Its tin-glazed surface, decorated in cobalt blue and luster, shows an idealized woman in profile, a type known as a bella donna. According to the museum, it is one of only 10 known Deruta dishes inscribed with verses by Petrarch, a link to the more than 100 rare Petrarch editions held by the Library.
Zhang Chenglong's hanging scroll Mount Tai, Lofty Marchmount, painted around 1600 in ink and color on silk, is nearly 10 feet tall. It follows a route of temples, villages, waterfalls and ancient cypress groves up Mount Tai in Shandong Province, one of China's Five Sacred Mountains. The Huntington plans to make it a centerpiece of an exhibition of Chinese garden painting currently scheduled for spring 2029.
Sargent Claude Johnson's Untitled (mask), from 1933, is hammered by hand from copper and finished with gilding. The institution describes it as drawing on West African traditions while celebrating Black American identity. Shown in the museum's 2024 Johnson exhibition, it joins his Organ Screen and Head of a Boy, alongside Harlem Renaissance-era works by Richmond Barthé, Charles White and Romare Bearden.
The most recent work is Raqib Shaw's tapestry Space Between Dreams – The Pragmatic Pessimist (2022–2023), which shows the artist burning books for warmth inside a frozen palace as polar bears gather on melting ice. Made for the 2024 exhibition "Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West" and partly inspired by The Huntington's Beauvais tapestries, it is reunited with its companion piece, The Perseverant Prophet, acquired in 2025.
Separately, Robert Indiana's LOVE has come to the collection as a gift; the sculpture is to be installed near the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art and shown to the public before the end of the year. Other 2026 gifts include watercolors by Joseph Stella and John Marin, works by seven founding members of American Abstract Artists, and 68 pieces of 18th- and 19th-century British silver.
