The story
In 1904 the American heir Archer Huntington, who had fallen for Spain as a young man, founded a free museum and library in upper Manhattan devoted entirely to the art of Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The Hispanic Society of America still stands on its original terrace at Audubon Terrace, well north of the usual museum district.
Its showpiece is a room Huntington commissioned from the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla, Vision of Spain, fourteen huge canvases finished in 1919 in which the regions of Spain parade in local costume under bright coastal light. Around them hang a Goya portrait of the Duchess of Alba, an El Greco, a Velázquez, and Spanish ceramics, textiles and rare books.
Huntington preferred to buy on the open market rather than take art out of Spain's churches, and he built the place to be entered free. The Sorolla room reopened after a long renovation, its fourteen panels wrapping the visitor in a painted tour of the country.
