Arabella (Yarrington) Huntington

American, 1850s - 1924

BiographyArabella Duval Yarrington was born in the early 1850s, a daughter of Catherine J. and Richard Milton Yarrington, a machinist who died in Richmond in 1859. In the late 1860s she moved with her family to New York, where on March 10, 1870, she gave birth to a son, Archer Milton Worsham, to whom she would remain intensely devoted for the rest of her life. Endowed with beauty, intelligence, and magnetic charm, she attracted the interest of the wealthy New York railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington. It was presumably Huntington's seed money that she parlayed into millions of dollars in the late 1870s and 1880s, chiefly through real estate and securities transactions that pitted her against William H. Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and other prominent New York powerbrokers. She devoted large sums to art collecting, filling her house on West 54th Street with progressive French landscapes by the Barbizon school and Aesthetic Movement furnishings by Herter Brothers. After years of rumors, she finally married the recently widowed Collis Huntington on July 12, 1884. During their marriage, she spent long periods in Europe, where she made extensive art acquisitions. The tremendous fortune she inherited on her husband's death in 1900 enabled her to shift her collecting to Old Master paintings, chiefly seventeenth-century Dutch, eighteenth-century French, and early Italian. Most notably, in 1907 she purchased (through the art dealer Joseph Duveen) $2.5 million worth of fine and decorative arts from the Rodolph Kann Collection. She was also a motivating force behind the British paintings collection formed by her deceased husband's nephew, Henry E. Huntington, whom she married at the American Church in Paris on July 16, 1913. She took great interest in the botanical gardens at her second husband's house in San Marino, California, but continued to gravitate toward New York. Her generous philanthropic gifts (almost all in memory of Collis Huntington), benefited such institutions as the Harvard Medical School, the Hampton Institute, the City of San Francisco, The American Geographical Society, and The Hispanic Society of America. Following a long period of illness, she died in New York, on September 16, 1924.

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