Hispanic Society of America

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Grounds of the Hispanic Society of America, with an equestrian statue of El Cid.

Entrance to the campus which the society shares with The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Hispanic Society of America is a museum of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American art and artifacts, as well as a rare books and manuscripts research library. Founded in 1904 by Archer M. Huntington, the institution is free and open to the public at its original location in a Beaux Arts building on Audubon Terrace an 155th Street in the lower Washington Heights area of New York City in United States.

Exterior sculpture at the Society includes work by Anna Hyatt Huntington and nine major reliefs by the Swiss-American sculptor Berthold Nebel, a commission that took ten years to complete.

[edit] Museum Collections

The museum contains works by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, El Greco, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, among others. The rare books library maintains 15,000 books printed before 1700, including a first edition of Don Quixote.

[edit] Recent news

On October 24, 2007, the Society sold two of its ancient Islamic texts at auction through Christie's Auction House in London. One, a Kuran dating to 1203 that sold for US $2.3 million, is the oldest known complete copy of the holy book. The other, selling for US $1.8 million, dates to the 10th century, is a nearly complete version of the Kuran likely from northern Africa.^[1]

Attendance at the museum is typically sparse although it is located near the MET's Cloisters, Dyckman Farmhouse Mansion and Manhattan's oldest mansion, the Morris-Jumel Mansion Museum, where George Washington once slept.