The Academy houses one of the largest public collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art in the country. It comprises over five thousand works in almost every artistic style of the past two centuries, from the linear portraiture of the Federal period and the naturalistic landscapes of the Hudson River School to studies of light and atmosphere that inform Tonalism and American Impressionism; from the gritty realism of the Ashcan movement to the modernist movements of Fauvism, abstraction, and photo- and magic-realism. Masterworks in these and other styles have come into the Academy’s collection mainly as gifts from newly elected National Academicians in compliance with membership requirements; thereby continually enriching the collection.
Before 1865, the National Academy led a rather nomadic existence, but during the early 1860s it raised funds for its first permanent home, a Venetian Renaissance Revival building designed by architect Peter B. Wight, which opened at 23rd Street and 4th Avenue in New York in 1865. The Academy’s offices, school, and exhibition facilities were located in that New York City landmark until 1900, when the site was sold to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
The Academy’s current headquarters and its second major home is on Fifth Avenue between 89th and 90th streets. The mansion, into which the Academy moved in 1942, was originally the home of Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955) and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973). Huntington was the heir to the fortune amassed by his father, railroad magnate Collis Huntington, an owner of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, among others. A major philanthropist, Archer Huntington was also a naturalist and a scholar who specialized in Spanish history, art, and literature. He is best remembered as the founder of the Hispanic Society in New York City, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and, with his wife, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.
In 1902, Archer Huntington purchased several properties along Fifth Avenue between 89th and 90th Streets, including a comparatively small house at number 1083. In 1913, he hired the architect and interior designer Ogden Codman, Jr., to enlarge the house, turning it into the mansion it is today. Codman, who was a colleague and friend of Edith Wharton, tripled the size of the residence by adding a large wing at the back, opening on to 89th Street. He remodeled the existing interiors in the French Renaissance Revival and neo-Grec styles he favored. The second floor was designed for entertaining; on the third floor were Archer Huntington’s living quarters; and, after his marriage in 1923, his wife had a five-room suite on the fourth floor. A number of small bedrooms for the couple’s more than twenty-five servants were located on the fifth and sixth floors. An expansive space on the fifth floor, which had a large skylight, was refitted as Anna Huntington’s sculpture studio.
The Huntingtons lived in this house until 1939 when they gave the building and surrounding properties to the National Academy, of which Anna Hyatt Huntington was a member and of which both were very supportive. The couple then moved to their country estate. Following Archer Huntington’s death in 1955, Mrs. Huntington maintained a studio and a small apartment in the Academy’s building until shortly before her death at the age of ninety-seven.
