The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

In one gallery here two children in satin face each other across the room. On one wall is Gainsborough's Blue Boy, a young man in shimmering blue from around 1770. Opposite hangs Pinkie, a girl in a windblown pink dress painted by Thomas Lawrence in 1794. They were never meant to be a pair, but Henry Huntington bought them for his California estate and hung them together, and generations of visitors have known them that way ever since.

Huntington made his fortune in railways and Los Angeles real estate. In 1919 he and his wife Arabella signed over their San Marino estate, its books and its art to a trust, and it opened to the public in 1928, the year after he died. He paid $728,000 for the Blue Boy in 1921, then the most anyone had spent on a painting.

The house is only part of it. The library holds a Gutenberg Bible and a draft of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and the grounds run to sprawling botanical gardens, so a visitor moves from English portraits to rare manuscripts to a desert garden in a single afternoon.