SPRING/SUMMER 2007 Naming the Chinese Garden PURSUING PUYAS EUCALYPTUS FEVER The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens The Huntington Library,Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens FROM THE EDITOR SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON SOMETHING BORROWED STEVEN S. KOBLIK President GEORGE ABDO Vice President for Advancement JAMES P. FOLSOM ITH THIS ISSUE, THE HUNTINGTON announces Marge and Sherm Telleen Director of the Botanical Gardens the name for its Chinese Garden. In the cover KATHY HACKER article, curator June Li explains how she and her Executive Assistant to the President colleagues drew on art, history, literature, SUSAN LAFFERTY Wand botany in selecting a Chinese name for the new 12- Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education acre site (page 13). SUZY MOSER Assistant Vice President for Advancement One feature of Chinese gardens is the borrowed view.While composed paths JOHN MURDOCH Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections take advantage of the beauty of the ROBERT C. RITCHIE immediate surroundings — a lake, a W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research tree, a plant — they also take in the distant landscape. For example, LAURIE SOWD the San Gabriel Mountains are well outside the boundaries of The Associate Vice President for Operations Huntington but nonetheless part of the scenery. ALISON D. SOWDEN Much of what takes place at The Huntington is the Vice President for Financial Affairs result of one kind of borrowing or another. By lending SUSAN TURNER-LOWE Rogier van der Weyden’s Madonna and Child to Vice President for Communications a traveling art exhibition,The Huntington has DAVID S. ZEIDBERG Avery Director of the Library helped provide a different context for viewing the 15th-century painting MAGAZINE STAFF (page 2). But borrowing is not Editor limited to the loans of paintings. MATT STEVENS The intellectual exchange between Huntington staff and local educator Avery Contributing Writers Clayton helped kick off a new African American cultural series while support- LISA BLACKBURN ing efforts to establish the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum in Los TRAUDE GOMEZ-RHINE Angeles (page 5). Designer LORI ANN VANDER PLUYM The back and forth among staff and visitors is seldom a zero-sum game. Botanist Rachel Schmidt Jabaily drew inspiration from her first glimpse of a puya plant at The Huntington and proceeded to travel throughout South Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications. It strives to connect America studying the family tree of the species (page 8). She returned to The readers more firmly with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features the Huntington recently on a fellowship to clarify identifications of all the puya work of researchers, educators, curators, and others plants in the Huntington Desert Garden. across a range of disciplines. History is full of stories of borrowed ideas or things. Civil engineer and This magazine is supported in part by the Annenberg Foundation. historian Henry Petroski explains how a 19th-century toothpick manufacturer INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS: took a page out of the shoe industry’s manual (page 22). And environmental Matt Stevens, Editor historian Jared Farmer contemplates the history of California’s eucalyptus trees, Huntington Frontiers 1151 Oxford Road which began with the first imports from Australia in the 1850s (page 18). Just as San Marino, CA 91108 borrowed views are part of a Chinese garden, eucalyptus trees are a permanent [email protected] fixture of the state’s landscape. Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography provided by the Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services. MATT STEVENS Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc. City of Industry, Calif. Above: Eucalyptus globulus. Drawing by Patty Lawson Christ. Opposite page, upper left: Porgy and Bess © 2007 The Huntington Library,Art Collections, and program, 1941. Courtesy of Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Right: Business logo, ca. 1910. Botanical Gardens.All rights reserved. Reproduction Jack London papers, Huntington Library. Lower left: Rachel Schmidt Jabaily holding a specimen of Puya oli- or use of the contents, in whole or in part, without vacea near Vallegrande, Bolivia, March 2006. Photo by Roberto Vásquez. permission of the publisher is prohibited. [ VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 ] Contents S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 A REAL CLIFFHANGER 8 Pursuing puya plants in the Andes by Rachel Schmidt Jabaily BREATHING LIFE INTO THE CHINESE GARDEN 13 Selecting a name by T.June Li GONE NATIVE 18 California’s long affair with eucalyptus trees by Jared Farmer 5 1 8 DEPARTMENTS DISCOVERY: The full picture by Joyce Lovelace 2 WORK IN PROGRESS: The art of collaboration by Traude Gomez-Rhine 5 LESSONS LEARNED: Perfecting the toothpick 8 by Henry Petroski 22 BOOKS IN PRINT: Recommended reading 24 HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 1 [ DISCOVERY ] Rogier van der Weyden’s Madonna and Child, ca. 1460. Huntington Art Collections. 2 Spring/Summer 2007 [ DISCOVERY ] The Full Picture UNFOLDING THE RICH HISTORY OF A PAINTING by Joyce Lovelace ROUND 1460, THE FLEMISH MASTER acquired it in 1841. Arabella Huntington purchased Rogier van der Weyden painted a tenderly Madonna and Child in 1907, and two years after her death maternal Mary holding the infant Jesus, who in 1924 it became part of the memorial collection that her playfully grasps a clasp of a finely bound vol- husband Henry established in her name. Aume, probably a Book of Hours. In its present-day home Shown together once during the 20th century, in a 1927 at The Huntington, this exquisite Madonna and Child is a exhibition of Flemish and Belgian art at Burlington House, jewel among jewels, and though perhaps not well known London, the two paintings were recently reunited in “Prayers to most visitors, it is a highlight of the holdings, on par and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych,” which with such iconic works as Pinkie or Blue Boy. opened in November 2006 at the National Gallery of Art It has also seemed something of a glorious anomaly in Washington, D.C., and recently concluded at the Royal here: a masterpiece of 15th-century Netherlandish art in a collection noted for strength in secular British and French art of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Underscoring its Madonna and Child originated contextual isolation, the painting has up to now hung with the rest of the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial as the left half of a diptych — Collection in the west wing of the Library, where the display focused on its successful cleaning and conservation a two-panel painting hinged by the Getty Museum. Lately out on loan, however, this significant work has to open and close like a book. been presented in a richly revealing new light — or more accurately, an old one. Madonna and Child (or Virgin and Child, as it is alter- nately known) originated as the left half of a diptych — Fine Arts Museum.The first exhibition devoted to the a two-panel painting hinged to open and close like a book. subject, it presented 36 diptychs from the 1400s and 1500s The complete object could stand open on a table or altar by leading artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and in a private chapel, or even in the private chamber of its Michel Sittow. owner. In the last years of his life, Rogier (1399/1400–1464) “Rogier is one of the great painters of the 15th century, developed a type of “devotional” diptych that combined and also one of the most influential,” says John Oliver Hand, an image of the Virgin Mother and Child with a facing curator of northern Renaissance paintings at the National portrait of the patron who had commissioned the painting. Gallery and an organizer of the show. “He is a supremely Considered among his finest works, they were intended rational artist, very careful, intricate, wonderfully precise. to aid intense prayer. He’s also a master of composition. He knows what he wants The Huntington’s picture is an example of this important to do, and he does things for a reason.There’s a kind of genre, paired with a likeness of a young Belgian nobleman abstract elegance to the design of his paintings; they’re very named Philippe de Croÿ, identifiable by his family arms linear.”The combination of Madonna and Child and Philippe painted on the reverse of his portrait.As with many multi- de Croÿ is, he says, a superb example of the master’s painterly panel paintings over the centuries, the two halves became skill. Displayed in a gallery along with other magnificent separated, probably in the course of trade, and the de Croÿ works,“it’s the star of that room, and one of the stars of the portrait is today in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone show,” Hand commented during the exhibit’s Washington Kunsten (Royal Fine Arts Museum) in Antwerp, which run.“You walk in, and it grabs you.” HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 3 The Huntington’s Madonna and Child reunited with Philippe de Croÿ. Huntington Art Collections and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. When the renovated Huntington Gallery reopens next Kully Director of Art Collections at The Huntington.“As year, Madonna and Child will be displayed in a new installa- with all religious art, it’s important to remember that this tion of the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Collection, is an object of personal devotion, maybe even veneration. hung with other Netherlandish altarpieces and close to We shall have it with other similar objects, so that you will Italian altarpieces. In this context viewers will be able to see it in a much more meaningful, human, and social con- engage with this powerfully realistic work in the way the text — one which I hope will enable people to relate to artist intended,“through empathy with the humanity of it as a document of human spirituality as well as of the God made man — with Mary as a real mother — so that highest aesthetic interest.” m faith becomes part of real life, not something remote and otherworldly,” says John Murdoch, Hannah and Russel Joyce Lovelace is a freelance writer on art and design.