Anna V. Hyatt Huntington

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973)

Anna Hyatt's decision to become a sculptor was partially due to her sister, Harriet (later Mrs. Alfred G. Mayor), who trained her in basic sculptural techniques. Anna Hyatt's first work was one on which she collaborated with her sister: a relief of a young boy with a dog, “The Pride of Our Great Dane” (whereabouts unknown), for which Harriet did the boy and Anna the dog. It was shown at the National Sculpture Society, New York, in 1898 to some favorable notice.(1)

Hyatt also may have had more formal, though brief, professional training with Henry H. Kitson in Boston, but it is certain that in 1902 she went to New York and attended Hermon McNeil's and George Grey Barnard's classes at the Art Students League.(2) Her sculptures were shown publicaly for the first time about 1900, when examples were displayed in the windows of Shreve, Crump and Low, a jewelry firm in Boston. In 1902 Hyatt had her first solo show, at the Boston Art Club, and the following year the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchased her Winter Noon, a depiction of two workhorses. She became famous in New York when the press covered her trips to local zoos, where she modeled wild animals from life (3), and she was soon considered one of the leading animaliers in this country. She also collaborated with another young sculptor, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, on several sculptures during her early years in New York, and this, too, gained Hyatt some helpful publicity.(4)

In 1907 she went to France with her sister, Harriet, and they rented a studio at Auvers-sur-Oise. She showed “Reaching Jaguar” (1905-7; casts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, S.C.) at the Paris Salon of 1908, traveled to Italy, and then settled in Paris. An equestrian figure of Joan of Arc that she had recently completed was shown at the Salon of 1910. It won an honorable mention, and a bronze version was eventually commissioned for Riverside Park in New York. That cast was unveiled with appropriate ceremonies and much acclaim in 1915; replicas were ordered for Blois, France, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Hyatt's fame was assured. In 1922 her efforts earned her induction into the French Legion of Honor.(5)

Other awards and honors continued to come her way. In 1920 her model for “Joan of Arc” won the Saltus Gold Medal at the National Academy of Design; in 1922 her “Diana of the Hunt” (casts at the National Academy of Design, New York; Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, S.C.) won the same prize; and in 1928 her “Fighting Bull” won the National Academy's Shaw Memorial Prize. It was during these years that she met the scholar and philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, who gave her several commissions, including one for a huge equestrian statue of El Cid (ca. 1927; cast at Hispanic Society of America, New York). The couple fell in love and were married in Hyatt's New York studio in 1923.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Anna suffered from tuberculosis, and she and her husband spent these years traveling in search of climates conducive to her recovery. They spent winters in South Carolina and, in 1930, bought several large tracts of land there. On one of these they established America's largest outdoor sculpture installation, Brookgreen Gardens, for which they purchased hundreds of works from contemporary American sculptors at a time--the Great Depression--when patronage was scarce. A large retrospective exhibition of Huntington's work was held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1932, and a selection of her small bronzes toured the country for the rest of the decade.

During her later years, she executed several more works for the Hispanic Society; two large groups for Brookgreen Gardens, “Don Quixote” (1947) and “Fighting Stallion”s (1950); “The Torch Bearers”, for the city of Madrid, with replicas for Havana, Cuba, and Norfolk, Virginia; and a heroic equestrian statue of the Cuban patriot José Martí (1958) that was eventually erected in New York's Central Park. Both Archer and Anna Huntington died at their Connecticut estate, Stanerigg, he in 1955 and she in 1973.

“Panther Looking Up”, 1917

Bronze, h. 6 3/4 in. (17.1 cm)

Signed (rear base): Anna V. Hyatt; inscribed (side base): GORHAM CO FOUNDERS Q 494 2

Number two in edition of twenty-five

Given in memory of Anthony and Mary Malinowski (1993.37)

“Reaching Jaguar (Panther)”, 1906; this cast, 1922

Bronze, h. 8 3/4 in. (22.2 cm)

Signed (rear base): “Anna V. Hyatt / #162”; inscribed (side base): Q38 GORHAM CO FOUNDERS

Number 162 in edition of 251

Given in memory of Anthony and Mary Malinowski (1993.36)

From the moment she began sculpting, Anna Hyatt Huntington had a preference for modeling animals. Her earliest favorites were domestic animals, mostly dogs and horses, but shortly after 1900 she turned to wild animals that she found in zoos in Boston, New York, and Paris. The big cats were certainly among her favorites and remained so at least into the 1920s. She modeled most species: jaguars, lions, mountain lions, panthers, and tigers. One of her earliest sculptures in this vein was “Reaching Jaguar”, (1905-07), finished at Auvers-sur-Oise from sketches made in New York and Paris. It was shown at the Paris Salon in 1908 and won the sculpture prize at the Woman's Art Club exhibition in New York three years later.960

The New Britain “Reaching Jaguar” is a small version of the original plaster, which was executed in bronze with slight changes in 1926 (casts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brookgreen Gardens, Murrell’s Inlet, S.C.). The subject was first conceived in 1905 or 1906, and was based on studies of Señor Lopez, a Paraguayan jaguar acquired by the New York Zoological Society in 1902. Señor Lopez was also the model for Jaguar, a companion piece to “Reaching Jaguar”, which also features the large animal crouching on a rock and gazing downward.

“Reaching Jaguar” and “Panther Looking Up” are two of many small bronzes Huntington produced with Gorham Company Founders, a Providence, Rhode Island, firm that cast her sculpture and marketed it in their Manhattan gallery. “Reaching Jaguar” in particular proved to be one of the artist’s best sellers; 251 casts were made between 1906 and 1946.

A solo exhibition of her animal sculptures, the first of several held at the galleries of the Gorham Company in New York, caused one critic to declare her to be "a new power in American sculpture." (7) Huntington's early renown as an animalier stayed with her until the end of her life. In the 1930s critics were still emphasizing her importance in the field, (8) and most of her solo exhibitions consisted completely, or at least mostly, of her sculptures of animals.(9)

DBD

Bibliography:

Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers, George Arents Research Library for Special Collections, Syracuse University; Doris E. Cook, “Woman Sculptor: Anna Hyatt Huntington” (1876-1973) (Hartford, Conn.: D.E.Cook, 1976); Susan Harris Edwards, "Anna Hyatt Huntington: Sculptor and Patron of American Idealism," M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1979; Beatrice Proske, "A Sculptor in New York," Sites 16-17 (1986): 30-36; Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, “Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works”, 1893-1939 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 71-78.

Notes:

1. Pauline king, “Two New Sculptures” “Art interchange 42 (September 1898): 54-55

2. Art Student League, Student Records, New York (and on microfilm, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).

3. “Women Sculpture and Bison in the Bronx Zoo Exchange Confidences”, New York Times, December 3,1905.

4. See for example “Two Young Women Sculpture Combine in ’Men with Bull’”, “WorlD, New York, March 24,1904 and Barbara H. Smith, “Two Women who Collaborate in Sculpture”, Crafstman 8 (1905):623-633

5. The press coverage of Hyatt’s Joan of Arc was extensive. See for example Grace Humpries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue, ”International Studio 57” (November 1915):xlvii-I; and Charles H. Caffin,”Miss Hyatt’s Statue of Joan of Arc”, ”Century 92 (June 1916):508-11

6. Cook, Woman Sculpture, p.24

7. Anna Coleman Ladd, “Anna V Hyatt-Animal Sculptor,” American Magazine of Art 4 (November 1912):773, Another exhibition concentrating on Hyatt’s animal sculptures was held at Gorham in 1914: see Art Notes, Evening Post, January 24, 1914.

8. For example, see Kkineton Parkes “An American Sculpturess of Animals: Anna Hyatt Huntington”,Apollo Magazine 16 (August 1932):61-66

9. For example, almost all of the sixty-nine sculptures by Huntington that were shown at the Telfair Academy Savannah, in 1939 were animals (see Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Savannah, Catalogue Exhibition of Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington, 1939). An exhibition of Huntington’s aluminum sculpture was held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco in 1944 in which all twenty-two pieces were of animals (see Bulletin of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum 2 (July 1944).