Huntington, Anna Hyatt

Anna Hyatt Huntington, original name Anna Vaughn Hyatt, (born March 10, 1876, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 4, 1973, Redding, Connecticut), American sculptor who brought great subtlety and vividness to equestrian and animal subjects.

Anna Hyatt Huntington was the daughter of noted Harvard paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt. She was educated privately and began her study of sculpture with Henry Hudson Kitson in Boston. She later attended the Art Students League in New York City. In 1900 Hyatt had her first one-woman exhibition, held in Boston, where she showed some 40 characteristic pieces—animal figures, delicately and accurately modeled and endowed with a lifelike spirit. In 1903 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York made its first of many acquisitions (Winter Noon, 1902) of her sculpture. In 1907 she traveled to France, and for a year she occupied a studio in Auvers-sur-Oise. She showed at the Paris Salon and in 1910 won honourable mention there for her equestrian statue of Joan of Arc, replicas of which were erected in New York in 1915 and subsequently in several other cities, both in the United States and in Europe. She became a member of the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum) in 1916.

In 1923 she married philanthropist, poet, and arts patron Archer M. Huntington, with whom in 1930 she founded the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and in 1931 Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, a sculpture garden and natural preserve where many of her large animal sculptures (e.g., Fighting Stallions, 1950) were installed on permanent display.

Huntington’s works of note include Diana and the Chase (1922); El Cid Campeador, an equestrian figure erected in Sevilla, Spain (1927); Don Quixote (1942; winner of the 1948 National Academy of Design’s Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal); figures of Cuban poet and patriot José Martí (1950), Abraham Lincoln on horseback (1961), and Andrew Jackson (1967); and a number of pieces for the grounds of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, an organization founded by her husband in 1904. She was granted membership into the French Legion of Honour in 1922 and received a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1930.