Upon entering the Hispanic Society, visitors are brought into a Spanish Renaissance-style courtyard composed of ornate architectural terracotta rising 35 feet high. Made by the Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Company of New Jersey, the designs on the arcade columns are based on the carvings that surround the windows of the early 16th-century patio of the castle of Vélez-Blanco in the province of Almería, now installed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The gallery houses the monumental series of 14 paintings known as Vision of Spain by the Valencian master Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, the preeminent artist in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society, commissioned the paintings in 1911 for a new gallery to be built on the west side of the main building. Sorolla already had been the subject of two enormously successful traveling exhibitions in the United States organized by the Hispanic Society in 1909 and 1911. The 1909 exhibition alone attracted some 160,000 visitors to the Hispanic Society in a period of one month.
From the beginning Huntington had intended to add sculpture to the buildings and to ensure their permanence by making them monumental works of art. Following his marriage to the sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt in 1923, plans for adding sculpture to Audubon Terrace began to take shape. Dominating the central space of the Hispanic Society’s lower terrace is the monumental bronze equestrian statue of El Cid Campeador.
The ceramics gallery will be on view beginning March 27th, 2025. Ceramics at the Hispanic Society Inspired by a deep love for the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, Hispanic Society founder Archer Milton Huntington (1870–1955) assembled a comprehensive collection celebrating Hispanic culture. Initially focused on archaeological artifacts and books, he expanded his scope to include paintings.
