Afternoon sun sets the Bird of Paradise blooms ablaze outside the Huntington Art Gallery.

Kehinde Wiley painted ‘A Portrait of a Young Gentleman’ in 2021 based on Thomas Gainsborough’s painting of the same name (now known as The Blue Boy). While Blue Boy radiates wealth and status, Wiley uses the same style to raise up those who typically lack privilege. And placing the two young men so they are facing each other across the gallery gets one thinking about how we view people in formal portraits.

Thomas Gainsborough’s famous ‘The Blue Boy’ from 1770 recalled the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck’s earlier glamorous portraits of British aristocrats. Blue Boy had the prime position in the Huntington Gallery.

This bust of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield in the Art Gallery includes him wearing a medal depicting St. George, England’s patron saint, and representing the knighthood he received in 1730.

The Huntington European Art Gallery showcases the art of 1700s England in the Huntington family’s former mansion.

This oversized book of John James Audubon’s ‘The Birds of America, vol. 2’ needed to be big enough to show nearly 500 species of birds in life-sized illustrations, including the Great Blue Heron.

Created in Italy in the late 1500s by Francesco Ghisolfi, this hand-drawn atlas offered kings and merchants up-to-date charts of coastlines and features of distant lands. A work of art, it also shows what Europeans knew (and didn’t know) about the rest of the world!

This facsimile of an original parchment of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (owned by the library) features gold illuminations, just like the original.

The reading room of the Huntington Library features original maps, drawings, photos and manuscripts from English and North American history. An even larger storage facility next door keeps track of the collection of 11 million items for researchers and rotating exhibits.

Banana leaves show the contrasts of light and shade in a corner of the Chinese Gardens.

A pair of rounded doors frames a view of the pond, inviting a glimpse into a world of color and tranquility.

A flower on one of the blooming fruit trees in the Chinese Garden catches the sunlight from behind.

Here’s the view from behind the waterfall looking out toward the pond. The waterfall is visible in the upper right of the Chinese Gardens1 image.

These intricately carved wooden panels were on display in an open-air pavilion next to the Chinese Garden pond.

Is that a fish or a dragon about to devour the top of a tiled roof in The Huntington’s Chinese Garden?

Stone mosaic walkways, intricate limestone rocks, and classic Chinese architecture produced peaceful scenes like this.

Wandering into The Huntington’s Chinese Garden, we enjoyed the reflections of stones, trees and sky in the pond.

Dolphins and other imaginative sea creatures decorate this Renaissance-era fountain at the end of a long tree-shaded lawn lined with classical-style statues.

This elaborate fountain appeared through a break in the Camelia bushes and trees as we walked through The Huntington Gardens, inviting us to get a closer view.

’Homage to Nature’ by Japanese-born artist Mineo Mizuno fills a premiere location near the entrance to The Huntington’s gardens. A sign identifies the work as a meditation on the fragility of California’s ecosystems; the charred logs of California Oak “speak to fire’s destructive potential, while the mottled glazes on the ceramic teardrops [showcase] its transformative power.”

This ‘Tinsie Grande’ camelia was one of the first blooms we encountered in our visit to The Huntington Gardens and Museums near Pasadena, CA. So nice to see bright colors outside at the end of January!