The Huntington Library,Art Collection & Botanic Gardens CA

San Marino the small beautiful and rich town is located between L.A and San Gabriel Mountains is hosting The Huntington Library,Art Collections and Botanic Gardens.

As a landowner, a businessman, and a visionary, Henry Edwards Huntington, (1850–1927), played a major role in the growth of southern California. Huntington was born in 1850 in Oneonta, New York, and was the nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington, (1821–1900), one of the famous "Big Four" railroad tycoons of 19th century California history. In 1892, Huntington relocated to San Francisco with his first wife, Mary Alice Prentice, and their four children. He divorced Mary Alice Prentice in 1906, and in 1913 married his uncle's widow, Arabella Huntington, (1851–1924), relocating from the financial and political center of northern California, San Francisco, to the state's newer southern major metropolis, Los Angeles. He purchased a property of more than 500 acres that was then known as the "San Marino Ranch", and went on to purchase other large tracts of land in the Pasadena and Los Angeles areas of Los Angeles County for urban and suburban development. As president of the Pacific Electric Railway Company, the regional streetcar/public transit system for the Los Angeles metropolitan area and southern California and also of the Los Angeles Railway Company, (later the Southern California Railway), he spearheaded urban and regional transportation efforts to link together far-flung communities, supporting growth of those communities as well as promoting commerce, recreation, and tourism. He was one of the founders of the City of San Marino, incorporated in 1913.

Huntington's interest in art was influenced in large part by his second wife, Arabella Huntington, (1851–1924), and with art experts to guide him, he benefited from a post-World War I European market that was "ready to sell almost anything". Before his death in 1927, Huntington amassed "far and away the greatest group of 18th-century British portraits ever assembled by any one man". In accordance with Huntington's will, the collection, then worth $50 million, was opened to the public in 1928.

(Quote from Wikipedia)

The huge house is surrounded by  beautiful gardens has a great art collection that includes paintings,statues and silverware,there are so many rooms that it is hard to imagine how all of them were used in those days and how one found the other…

The Magna Carta Law and Legend,1215-2015 was presented in one of the rooms to the public and it was the first time for us to see it.

In 1215 Magna Carta was a peace treaty between the King and the rebel barons. In that respect it was a failure, but it provided a new framework for the relationship between the King and his subjects. The 1225 version of Magna Carta, freely issued by Henry III (r.1216-72) in return for a tax granted to him by the whole kingdom, took this idea further and became the definitive version of the text. Three clauses of the 1225 Magna Carta remain on the statute book today. Although most of the clauses of Magna Carta have now been repealed, the many divergent uses that have been made of it since the Middle Ages have shaped its meaning in the modern era, and it has become a potent, international rallying cry against the arbitrary use of power.

 

Leaving the “history” and the Library behind us we strolled to the Japanese Gardens to relax…

     

The small bridges,waterfalls,reflections and the “laud” quietness puts you in the right mode for relaxation..DO NOT MISS this place whenever you are in the area.