The Hispanic Society of America, located on Audubon Terrace at 155th Street just west of Broadway, has one of the greatest collections of Spanish paintings, prints, textiles, books, and illuminated manuscripts outside of Spain. The museum’s holdings include works from the Bronze Age to the present century, from Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and the Philippines. Founded in 1904 by Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955), the society not only has paintings by El Greco, Velazquez, Zubaran, and Goya – as well as an almost complete set of Goya’s prints – it also houses substantial collections of documents and decorative arts and more than 150,000 photographs from 1850 onward. Now, in celebration of the Hispanic Society’s 100th anniversary, the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute of New York has organized the centennial exhibition “From Goya to Sorolla,” an offering of 75 Spanish 19th- and 20th-century drawings, oil sketches, and paintings from the Hispanic Society.

Absent from this show, which is made up mostly of Spain’s French-Impressionist-inspired second and third strings, are many of the Hispanic Society’s greatest hits. You will find that only one Goya painting, “Portrait of Pedro Mocarte” (c. 1805-06), and a grouping of nine Goya drawings have made it downtown to Park Avenue and 68th Street. If you want to see Goya’s “Duchess of Alba” (1797); Velazquez’s portraits of “Cardinal Astalli (Pamphili)” and of “Count-Duke of Olivares”; or El Greco’s “Portrait of a Man” (c. 1586-90), “Pieta” (c. 1575), and “The Holy Family” (c. 1585), you must make the trip up to Washington Heights.

“Portrait of Pedro Mocarte,” though over-cleaned, is a stunning representation of the choir member dressed not as a singer but as a majo or possibly a torero. Glowing from out of a deep, velvety black is a pyramidal mountain of a man, dressed in a rich, brown cape and a glistening white shirt. The portrait is made up of delicious, broad brushstrokes that sweep across the canvas. A prominent, sculpted head with a large, piercing, frontal eye pulls the small head toward the viewer. The monumental elasticity of the Goya is even more evident when it is compared to a nearby painting by Mariano Fortuny, “Copy After Goya’s Portrait of Pedro Mocarte” (1867), in which Fortuny has made Mocarte’s head too large, seemingly in order to compensate for the much weaker head and eyes in his portrait.

The beautiful grouping of Goya’s drawings (all from 1828) is equally enticing. In typical Goya fashion, we are presented with a wide, strange range of grotesque yet strikingly human figures in allegorical vignettes. There are women rolling about like lovers (“Majas Fighting”); a man who straddles a stream like a bridge, hoisting a woman across the water (“Peasant Carrying Woman”); a grinning man gazing up at another man’s exposed buttock (“The Whole World”); and a man, hands tied behind his back, being raised block-and-tackle style by another man who is turning a wrench (“Torture of a Man”).

Very close to Goya for its sense of the grotesque and the macabre is Eugenio Lucas Velazquez’s weird and stormy landscape painting, “A Procession” (1859). Although a little too sharp in color and too vague in drawing to be completely satisfying, the yellow/violet canvas is captivating for its faces alone. The haunting painting calls to mind pictures of burials, sacrifices, resurrections, and crucifixions, and it sways with a mob of bizarre, out-of-scale, or monstrous figures who leer at the viewer and appear to torment as much as follow the giant, sun-lit priest.

The show is titled “From Goya to Sorolla,” and another tiny oil on cardboard, “The Beach, Valencia” (c. 1908) by Joaquin Sorolla, is also free and lovely. But, among the 10 Sorolla paintings on view at the Spanish Institute, it is the only one that is successful. All of the larger works by Sorolla are pastiches of better artists. Indeed, this is the problem with far too many of the canvases in the exhibition. The large portraits by Ignacio Zuloaga are knock-off Manets, the landscapes of Aureliano de Beruete imitation Pissarros. Other works are heavily influenced seemingly more by American and British-inspired Impressionism than by French Impressionism itself.

Huntington aspired to enlighten Americans about a culture that was slipping away. But he thought Picasso was too modern to accurately portray Spain. It is as if many of the artists in this show were painting with nostalgic, borrowed voices. It is as if they had already lost their sense both of Spain and of being Spanish – two traits that are always clear in the works of Picasso. In terms of modern art, the show is true to Huntington’s taste. But, with the Hispanic Society’s broad and spectacular collection of works from which to choose, his shortsightedness need not have been emphasized.

The modern Spain brought to us by Huntington is too fluffy to feel genuine. Many artists he favored painted a watered-down, sentimental culture closer to Sargent than to Goya. Most of the late-19th and early-20thcentury paintings in the show are stiff and without that essential Spanish color and darkness and life. They lack the essential Spanish vitality and truth we are so aware of in Goya, El Greco, Velazquez, and Picasso – some of the greatest-ever voices to pick up a brush.

Sorolla’s paintings “Leonese Peasants” (1907), “After the Bath” (1908), “Beach of Valencia by Morning Light” (1908), and his portrait “Louis Comfort Tiffany” (1911) all feel staged and safe; saccharine and false. Sorolla’s figures, and those painted by many of the artists in this show, feel lifeless, lost, and frozen, as if they are caught between the old and new worlds. In this way “From Goya to Sorolla” – with its predictable sentimental leaning toward bad French Impressionist-inspired painting – feels packaged.

It is worth wading through the less-than-spectacular artists’ works, however, for the discoveries that await elsewhere in the exhibition. Among these are Federico de Madrazo’s convincingly solid portraits: “Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres” (1833), a three-quarter view of the French master dressed in a black coat and high, white collar; and the standing portrait of his younger brother, “Pedro de Madrazo” (1842), which feels heavily influenced by Van Dyck.

Joaquim Mir’s “El cimbori, Tarragona Cathedral” (1928) – a bold canvas filled mostly with the bright-orange, sun-drenched walls of the cathedral – is fiery and alive, as if the building, activating the blue sky, were rising to a boiling point. Somewhere between Vlaminck and Monet, Mir’s towering edifice gives color a revelatory power. And there is something simple and calming about Santiago Rusinol’s creamy, violet, and green painting of a dusk-lit cemetery, “Calvario at Sagunto” (1901). Its army of cypresses stands somber and erect, like sentries or mourners, in and around the white, rose-tinted walls and steps at the entrance to the graveyard.

I also was charmed by Isidre Nonell’s “La Roser (profile)” (1909). Nonell was friends with Picasso in Barcelona; and the two artists showed their work at Els Quatre Gats. “La Roser (profile),” a brushy and airy, brownish portrait of a woman, with touches of rose and blue, is modeled like Picasso’s blue period canvases yet closer in hue to some of the sepia paintings Picasso did during his rose period.

Equally exciting are Ignacio Pinazo’s unfinished “Self-Portrait” (c. 1899-01), a sketchy head and shoulders in peach, blue, and gray; and a few small plein-air oil sketches. One, “Castillo de Guadamur” (1910), an oil on cardboard, was painted by Federico’s son, Ricardo de Madrazo. The painting, a salmon-pink castle under a violet-gray sky, is quick and loose and warm. Its figures, trees, and houses, mere notations laid down with delicacy and confidence, reveal a freshness before the motif reminiscent of Corot and Marquet.

I readily applaud the Spanish Institute for bringing even a piece of the Hispanic Society downtown, but this exhibition could have been so much better. “From Goya to Sorolla,” as if it is coddling and appealing to an audience it knows is readily available, ignores much of what is great not only about the Hispanic Society but also what is great about Spanish art and Spain.

Until July 30 (684 Park Avenue, between 68th and 69th Streets, 212-628-0420).