Hispanic Society Museum & Library

Story

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.CollectionsThe 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.