Location: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA
The opening times: Monday - Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday Closed
Entrance fee: Weekdays Weekends, Monday holidays
Adults $15 $20
Students $10 $10
Day/time of visit: 07-25-2010
Duration of visit: 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Describe the layout, content, special exhibitions, etc.
When I heard we would go to the Huntington "Library," I felt a little afraid. But when we arrived there, I found it played us a trick. Actually, it is a world park with many gardens of various styles, and many separate museums and art galleries.
There were many families with their children and many foreign visitors in the Huntington Library. And I found lots of Chinese visitors there, because I heard a lot of Chinese. Actually, the foreign visitors paid more attention on their professional traveling with their guides and were busy with taking photos, while the local visitors were more relaxed and usually just looked around, which was also why I said it was more like a park but not a museum or a library.
One of the art galleries in the Huntington Library was the Huntington Art Gallery, originally the house of Henry E. Huntington and his second wife, which displayed one of the most comprehensive collection of 18th- and 19th-century British and French art in the country, including the celebrated Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough and Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence.
And the most popular part in Huntington Art Gallery was the Thornton Portrait Gallery. There were dozens of people in the gallery room. In average, they spent over half an hour there, and the most time was spent on the most famous paintings of the Blue Boy and Pinkie. But I thought the Thornton Portrait Gallery was more popular just because of many couches there. And actually, most foreign visitors went there just for finding places to sit, while most local visitors more preferred to walk around and look at the paintings. That was a very interesting phenomena.
And Viet told me the Blue Boy was very famous because it often appeared on American textbooks. So I guessed the different reactions between the foreign and the local visitors was because the foreigns did not know much about the background of the paintings, but the citizens were more aware of their meanings.
And in the Botanical Gardens, there were more than a dozen specialized gardens arranged within a park-like landscape of rolling lawns. Among the most remarkable were the Desert Garden, the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden, and the Chinese garden.
The most interesting thing was, when we were in the Flowing Fragrance Garden of the Chinese garden, I stood in the pavilion, I thought I was in Beijing, not only because there were many Chinese visitors there, but also because the garden was so like the Summer Palace in Beijing. And until I saw Danielle's face, I realized it was just my daydream.
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