The Man Who Funded This Observatory Shot His Wife and Went to Prison

Griffith Observatory exists because a convicted felon spent his final years trying to buy back a reputation he'd destroyed. Griffith J. Griffith, the mining magnate who'd already donated the land that became Griffith Park, shot his wife in a Santa Monica hotel room in 1903 during an alcohol-fueled paranoid episode, permanently disfiguring her and costing her an eye. He served nearly two years in San Quentin. After his release, he tried to fund an observatory and planetarium for the city as a gesture of civic redemption — and the city refused to take his money, unwilling to be associated with an ex-convict. Griffith left the funds in his will instead, and only after his death did Los Angeles finally accept the gift, eventually building the observatory that opened in 1935 and still offers free public telescope viewing most clear nights.

The Blue Boy caused something close to a national outcry in Britain when Henry Huntington bought it in 1921 for what was then the highest price ever paid for a painting. The sale, coming so soon after the First World War, was widely read in England as a symbol of American wealth eclipsing British cultural power, and before the painting could leave the country the National Gallery in London staged a farewell exhibition that drew enormous crowds. The gallery's director wrote "au revoir" on the back of the canvas, hoping it might someday come home. It did — briefly, exactly one century later — before returning to hang in the gallery that now sits inside the Huntington's grounds.