On a warm day under a flawless sky, Edward Nygren, AS '69M, shows a visitor his workplace--150 lush acres filled with statues, flowers and fountains.

"I can't think of a better place to be," Nygren says. "The grounds are gorgeous, my colleagues are exceptional and it's an unusually collegial atmosphere."

As director of the art collections, Nygren is surrounded by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

An important humanities research institution, the Huntington boasts major collections of British and American art. Located in San Marino, Calif., northeast of Los Angeles, it also houses 800,000 books and more than 3 million manuscripts in British and American history, culture and science. Established as a private institution in 1919 by railroad magnate and developer Henry Edwards Huntington, it opened to the public following Huntington's death in 1927.

"It's almost inconceivable that anyone interested in British and American art and culture, particularly of the 18th and 19th century, would not come here to do research," Nygren says.

Resources include one of the most comprehensive collections of late 18th and early 19th century British art outside London. Offerings include two popular favorites--Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy and Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie.

Meanwhile, the Huntington's American art collection showcases works by Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley and Frederic Remington, among others. However, this collection, started in 1984, "was so new," Nygren says, "that there were more opportunities to expand [it], and more need, too."

To this end, he says, the Huntington's recent acquisitions of American art include major portraits by Thomas Eakins and John
Singer Sargent and a major still life by William Harnett.

Nygren says he feels comfortable pursuing British and American art because his academic work focuses on the exchange of artistic ideas between the nations.

The interest did not develop while Nygren was an undergraduate at Amherst College in Massachusetts or when he worked in three professions afterward. But, when he decided in 1966 to pursue a career in museums, the then-current practice of studying early American art isolated from British art made no sense.

"The American colonies were part of Great Britain," Nygren says. "After the Revolution, American artists traveled to England to study at the Royal Academy and to exhibit their work."

Nygren investigated the connection between British and American art while working on his master's degree at UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He pursued the idea more deeply when completing a Ph.D. in 1976 at Yale University. The idea held his interest while working at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from 1976-88, and at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Mass., from 1988-91.

When the Huntington offered a job in 1991, his continuing interest in the relationships between British and American art fit right in. "In one institution, there were visual and documentary materials that were central to my intellectual and scholarly pursuits," he says. "It was almost as if it were an institution created especially for me."