Art & Architecture : Art Notes : A Master Steps Into the Huntington : The acquisition of an Eakins portrait adds a high point to the collection.

“It’s a portrait of an ear,” said Edward J. Nygren, the droll but very proper director of art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. He was talking about a large portrait by Thomas Eakins, the Huntington’s latest American art acquisition, and he wasn’t kidding--or at least not entirely.

The painting, which stands 5 feet tall, portrays David Wilson Jordan, a dapper friend and star student of Eakins, with his back to the viewer and his face in profile. And indeed, Jordan’s ear is carefully painted straight-on and dead-center, as the focal point of the upper part of the canvas.

Odd as the pose may appear, it isn’t an accident. “This portrait shows the importance of introspective thought to Eakins,” said Amy Meyers, the Huntington’s curator of American art.

Eakins, a native of Philadelphia who lived from 1844 to 1916, is regarded as one of the greatest American painters of his era. Known as a powerfully expressive Realist, he often painted portraits charged with psychological insights and provocative enigmas. True to form, this three-quarter-length view of a man in a black suit, clutching a pair of white gloves, sparks questions about the subject’s personality and his relationship with Eakins, Meyers said.

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She knows some of the answers, however. Jordan was a minor landscape painter with a theatrical bent. Fifteen years younger than Eakins, he was a star student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, where Eakins had studied and began teaching painting and drawing in 1878.

Although Eakins’ insistence on drawing from life was controversial, he was appointed director of instruction at the academy in 1882 and maintained that position until 1886, when he was forced to resign over a dispute about the use of a nude male model in a mixed drawing class. Jordan remained loyal to Eakins, who painted the Huntington portrait in 1899, when his former student was 40, Meyers said.

Eakins is generally classified as a Scientific Realist because of his interest in human anatomy and life drawing, but he was also an innovator. In “David Wilson Jordan,” he placed a realistic likeness on an abstract greenish-gold background that can be interpreted as either landscape or fabric. In either case, the background contributes to the intimacy of the image, Nygren noted.

Purchased from a Midwest private collection for an undisclosed sum with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation, the portrait is the first painting by Eakins to enter the Huntington’s collection. The acquisition also gives a significant boost to Southern California’s meager holdings of the artist’s work. The only other large paintings by Eakins in nearby public institutions are “Portrait of J. Carroll Beckwith” at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego and “Portrait of Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli” at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. The San Diego museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art also each own one relatively small painting by Eakins.

“David Wilson Jordan” has been installed in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery, on the opposite end of a wall from John Singer Sargent’s “Mrs. William Playfair.” Both works are three-quarter-length portraits painted in the late 19th century by major American artists, but they provide a striking contrast. “Mrs. Playfair,” which depicts a garrulous woman facing her audience in a white dress, is “a study in openness,” while the dark-suited “Jordan” appears to have closed himself off from viewers, Meyers said.

The Scott Gallery opened 15 years ago as the result of a gift from the Scott Foundation consisting of 50 American paintings, funds to build a gallery for American art and an endowment for operations. Although the Huntington is known as a bastion of British culture, broadening its mission to include American art fulfills a vision of the institution’s founder, railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington. While the only American artworks purchased by Huntington himself were portraits of people whose book collections he had acquired and decorative items, he indicated an interest in becoming a more active collector of American art, Nygren said.

With help from the Scott Foundation, a collectors’ council formed by Nygren, and many gifts from other friends of the Huntington, the American collection now encompasses about 250 paintings along with sculptural works, furniture and other decorative arts and thousands of prints and drawings.

“This is a very young collection,” Meyers said, noting that many gaps remain to be filled. But the Eakins has arrived “at a wonderful moment when the collection is hitting its stride,” she said. The relatively skeletal representation of American art that launched the gallery has been fleshed out with the addition of sculptures by Daniel Chester French and Paul Manship, a painting by Thomas Moran and a rare Chippendale-Hepplewhite sofa, among hundreds of other pieces.

Meyers intends to expand the collection even further, particularly with works from the early 20th century. The opening next spring of the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery will provide a new space for temporary exhibitions in a renovated carriage house, so the Scott Gallery’s temporary exhibition space will be converted into an additional showcase for the permanent collection.

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (626) 405-2141. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

FRANCE WEST: France generally promotes its contemporary artists abroad by enlisting a native curator to organize an international traveling exhibition and booking it into prestigious venues around the world. “Cote Ouest: A Season of French Contemporary Exhibitions” takes a different approach. The series of shows was organized by American West Coast curators and is scheduled to appear this fall and winter at museums, universities and alternative spaces from Seattle to San Diego.

The project began last year when the Americans traveled to France--as guests of the Association Francaise d’Action Artistique and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. Asked to “think globally and act locally” as they developed “a uniquely American perspective on the diversity of the current French art scene,” the visitors toured studios, met artists and selected works to be shown in their exhibition spaces at home.

Billed as “an eclectic mix of new French art,” the series includes photography by Matthieu Manche at the 18th Street Complex in Santa Monica (Monday to Nov. 14), a wall painting by Tania Mouraud in the lobby of the UCLA/Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center (Sept. 22 to Jan. 2) and a film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Oct. 1-31). Among many other events, the Getty Research Institute will present photographers Anne and Patrick Poirier’s interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel “Gradiva,” about an archeologist who is obsessed with a bas-relief image of a woman (Nov. 6 to Jan. 13).

“Cote Ouest,” or West Coast, is supported locally by the Broad Art Foundation, formerly the Eli Broad Family Foundation. The series will be launched Sept. 23 at Bergamot Station, in conjunction with the opening of a retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s video art and a program of video works by other French artists at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Several galleries also will show works by French artists over the next six months. Among them, Shoshana Wayne is hosting Jacques de la Villegle’s collage-like compositions of film posters (to Thursday); Ruth Bachofner will feature Michel Alexis’ abstract paintings (Saturday to Oct. 23); and Louis Stern Fine Arts will show architectural drawings and projects by Claude Parent and other architects (Jan. 15 to Feb. 26).

A guide to the entire series, describing each project, will be available at participating venues and inserted in the October and November issues of Gallery Guide, distributed free at local galleries.