Huntington in His Hands : Edward Nygren expects to add more American works and ‘a new set of eyes’ to library’s collections.

“It’s probably corny to say you like ‘Pinkie’ and ‘Blue Boy,’ but how could you not? They are such monuments of British art history,” said Edward J. Nygren, admiring two popular favorites by Sir Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. “I have a particular fondness for Gainsborough (the painter of ‘Blue Boy’) because I’m a sucker for artists who love to paint. The way he can turn paint into flickering light and gossamer effects is breathtaking.”

Like a sugar addict in a confectioner’s shop, Nygren was sampling one delight after another in the galleries that will become his professional home in March. Currently director and chief curator of the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Mass., Nygren will succeed Robert Wark as curator of the Huntington’s art collections. Wark recently retired after 34 years.

On a brief visit to Los Angeles, Nygren reflected on the “exhilarating” prospect of overseeing the Huntington’s renowned collection. “No museum in the country can lay claim to the quality of the Huntington’s British portraits in the grand manner,” he said. “This is a collection I have known about for a long time, but I haven’t known it well and I’m looking forward to that.”

A scholar of British and American art--and a believer that the two go hand-in-hand--Nygren appears to have been called to exactly the right place. While the Huntington’s collection is predominantly British, the venerable institution received a bequest of 50 American paintings from Virginia Steele Scott in 1980 and subsequently built an elegant gallery for them.

One of the Huntington’s strongest attractions for Nygren is that he will be able to do research on both British and American art, as well as indulge his affection for decorative arts, which are displayed with paintings and sculpture.

Building on research demonstrating the influence of English art on American artists, Nygren plans to explore British-American connections in the Huntington’s library and art collections, and display some of the results in exhibitions.

Nygren became persuaded that knowledge of British art is fundamental to understanding American art while enrolled in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He went on to study both fields at Yale, earning his Ph.D. in 1976. Subsequently he served as associate curator of painting at the Yale Center for British Art and as curator of collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., before taking his current post at Smith in 1988.

Unlike the Yale collection, in which donations by Paul Mellon convey an “Anglophile’s impression of an upper-class country gentleman’s life,” the Huntington reflects “the ideals, pretensions and tastes of an American magnate of the early 20th Century,” Nygren said. The building that houses the collection is the former mansion of railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, and the lavish estate gives visitors an impression of stepping back into time.

With its literary and artistic masterpieces, sumptuous gardens and masses of tourists, the Huntington is so well established that it might seem difficult for a new curator to have an impact, but Nygren said his task is to bring “a new set of eyes” to the collection.

A curator is always concerned with “electrifying or energizing” artworks so that viewers see them in a new way, he said. “As an art historian, I have a strong interest in material culture--in the objects themselves--but I also have a desire to place them in a cultural context. Fortunately I will be able to do that here,” he said.

High prices and a meager budget preclude making many additions to the already rich British collection, but Nygren has one item on his wish list. “I think the collection could sustain the addition of a James Ward,” he said, referring to a British artist known for dramatic animal paintings who was the subject of Nygren’s doctoral dissertation.

Collecting American art is more promising because the Virginia Steele Scott bequest included an endowment for that purpose. “I think we can develop a distinguished American collection,” Nygren said.

Such curatorial challenges are familiar territory; Los Angeles is not. “It’s a jolt,” he said, confiding that he had telephoned John Walsh, who left Boston to direct the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, to ask whether it was possible for a dyed-in-the-wool Easterner to adjust to Los Angeles.

The Getty Trust’s multifaceted programs in art history and plans for a $300-million cultural center in Brentwood, currently under construction, were no small part of that decision, Nygren said. “In terms of art historical research and of the people who will be coming here, it’s enormously exciting. Not next year, but in five years or so, there will be nothing comparable in the world. To be part of that is very exciting.”