American Women Collectors: The lives of Arabella D. Huntington and Lillie P. Bliss

The history of art collecting is a fairly new area of research within the domain of art history but nonetheless highly interesting. At the beginning, the research focused solely on the big robber barons of the Gilded Age like J. Pierpont Morgan, William and Henry Walters or Henry Clay Frick.

Tosca Ruggieri has put togher a series of lectures on American Women Collectors*, to explore the portraits of some of the ordinary and extraordinary women who shaped part of today's American cultural scene thanks to their approach towards collecting art.

Why are we not talking more about women art collectors? Why did the collecting of precious objects became such a significant feature in the lives of American Woman during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? What legacy did they leave behind?

In this lecture Tosca Ruggieri  will discuss Arabella Huntington and Lillie P. Bliss.

Huntington, a Richmond native was by 1900 one of the richest and most mysterious women in the world. She contributed in the foundation of San Marino's Huntington Library, Art Gallery and Botanical Gardens, nowadays considered one of the great Gilded Age mansions of America.  

Lillie P. Bliss was born in Boston and became a highly influential collector of modern art in the early years of the 20th century. She was part of the group of women behind the creation of the MoMA. It is mainly thanks to her bequest that the museum was able to start its permanent collection.

This is a pre-recorded lecture.

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* Other talks in this series:

Isabella Stewart Gardner, a Venetian fantasy in Boston