Hispanic Society museum building on Audubon Terrace
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Established | May 18, 1904 |
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Location | New York City |
Coordinates | 40°50′01″N 73°56′47″W / 40.833521°N 73.946514°W |
Type |
Art museum Research library |
Collection size | 6,800 paintings 1,000 sculptures 175,000 photographs 250,000 books |
Visitors | 20,000 |
Director | Mitchell Codding |
Public transit access |
Subways: at 157th Street Buses: Bx6, Bx6 SBS, M4, M5, M100 |
Website | www |
The Hispanic Society of America is a museum and reference library for the study of the arts and cultures of Spain and Portugal and their former colonies in Latin America, the Philippines and Portuguese India. (Despite the name and the founder's intention, it has never functioned as a learned association.) Founded in 1904 by Archer M. Huntington, the institution remains at its original location in a 1908 Beaux Arts building on Audubon Terrace (at 155th Street and Broadway) in the lower Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City in the United States. A second building, on the north side of the terrace, was added in 1930. Exterior sculpture in front of that building includes work by Anna Hyatt Huntington and nine major reliefs by the Swiss-American sculptor Berthold Nebel, a commission that took ten years to complete. The Hispanic Society complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012.
The museum contains more than 18,000 works in every medium, ranging from prehistoric times to the 20th century. There are important paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, El Greco, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, among others, as well as sculpture and architectural elements, furniture and metalwork, ceramics and textiles.
A major component of this museum is the Sorolla Room which was reinstalled in 2010. It displays the Vision of Spain, 14 massive paintings commissioned by Archer Huntington that Sorolla created from 1911 to 1919. These magnificent paintings, totaling over 200 linear feet (61 m), ring the large room and depict scenes from each of the provinces of Spain.