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From Miniatures to Monuments: The Legacy of Anna Hyatt
Huntington
By Kerry Longbottom
Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) is a highly unusual
artist in the history of American women sculptors. Over the
course of her 70 year long career she enjoyed a level of
popularity almost unheard of for women artists in the early 20th
century. Born in 1876, Anna Hyatt belonged to the generation of
women artists who had fought their way into art schools only to
find that their academic training did not bring the same promise
of professional recognition that it held for men, and yet she was
able to navigate around this obstacle and become one of the most
commercially successful American sculptors of all time.
Primarily known for her small-scale sculptures of wild animals,
Hyatt was also successful as a sculptor of large-scale public
monuments, which were widely acclaimed by both critics and public
audiences. This paper will address the strategies Anna Hyatt
employed in order to maintain her career as a woman sculptor of
both miniatures and monuments and how these strategies changed
1
after her marriage, arguing that the domestic display of
miniatures allowed her to overcome stigmas of female labor and
her later creation of monumental sculptures depended on her
participation in her husband’s philanthropic ventures.
Like many women artists, Anna Hyatt’s initial interest in
art was shaped by her family. Her mother and both of her
grandmothers had received as much formal art training as was
available to them in their day, and her mother, Audella Beebe
Hyatt, had even been a well-received painter before marrying Anna
Hyatt’s father.1 Anna had initially focused her studies on
playing the violin, while her older sister Harriet studied
sculpture with Henry Hudson Kitson in Boston.2 Although it is
often reported that Kitson became Anna’s first teacher, she
stated in an interview that “I was in his studio once or twice…
but I never had any criticism from him,” and that it was really
from Harriet that she first learned to sculpt.3
Alpheus Hyatt, Anna’s father, was a distinguished
1Anne Higonnet, “Wild at Heart: Rediscovering the Sculpture of Hyatt Huntington,” Magazine Antiques 181, no. 1 (2014): 175; Lisa Pasachnik, “Capturingthe Wild: Anna Vaughn Hyatt, Sculptor,” Style 1900 13, no. 4 (2000):57. 2 Oral History Interview with Anna Hyatt-Huntington, circa 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.3 Interview.
2
paleontologist and zoologist who taught at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Anna often accompanied him on trips
to the zoo to study animals.4 In addition to helping familiarize
Anna with a variety of animals at a young age, it seems that
Alpheus also taught her his scientific methods of observation.5
Her nephew, A. Hyatt Mayor, later noted that “looking
tremendously closely at something rubbed off as a family
characteristic.”6 Under her father’s influence, Anna Hyatt
developed a strong understanding of the ways animals moved and
how these movements were determined by their anatomy, an
understanding that would later be vital to her success as a
sculptor.7
It was because of Anna Hyatt’s passion for studying animals
that her sister Harriet first persuaded her to enter sculpture.
According to Anna, “[s]he wanted to do a group which combined a
boy and an animal and she said, ‘I can’t do animals; I don’t know
anything about them and you’ve studied animals ever since you
4 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 175.5 Myrna G. Eden, Energy and Individuality in the Art of Anna Huntington, Sculptor and Amy Beach, Composer (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 14.6 Eden, Energy and Individuality, 14.7 Eden, Energy and Individuality, 14.
3
were knee-high to a grasshopper.’”8 This collaboration with her
sister was realized as a composition of a boy and a dog, called
The Pride of Our Great Dane, with Anna modeling the dog after a family
pet.9 The sculpture was well-received by critics, and was
exhibited and sold at the National Sculpture Society in New York
in 1898.10 From then on Anna Hyatt endeavored to become a
professional sculptor, a task she accomplished with remarkable
success.
Her commercial breakthrough came at the turn of the century
in Boston, when Thomas Lawson of the Shreve, Crump & Low Company
saw some of her early bronze statuettes at an exhibition and told
her that he “wanted everything [she] could produce.”11 Lawson
was instrumental to the establishment of her professional career,
as it was through Shreve, Crump & Low that her early works were
cast and sold.12 Around the year 1900, when Anna Hyatt was 24,
she moved to New York and partnered with Gorham & Company, and
through their efforts to promote her works through catalogues and
exhibitions she was fully able to support herself from her 8 Interview.9 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 58; Eden, Energy and Individuality, 16.10 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 58; Eden, Energy and Individuality, 16.11 Interview.12 Interview.
4
sculpture income.13 In fact, her miniatures sold so well that in
1912 she was reported to be one of the highest-earning
professional women in the United States.14
It was a remarkable achievement for such a young woman to be
able to support herself with her artwork, and she later recalled
that this was even more so given that animal sculpture was a
highly competitive market in New York when she arrived there.15
Despite the possible setbacks of this competition, however, Anna
Hyatt’s branch of sculpture offered some unique possibilities for
a professional woman in the art world. Miniatures had surged in
popularity at the beginning of the 20th century due to their
affordability and the ease with which they could be displayed in
private homes; as a result it was rare for Anna Hyatt to sell any
statues that were larger than 40 inches tall.16 Even her most
prestigious early client, the Metropolitan Museum, chose to
purchase three different works that were all smaller than one
foot high.17 This craze for small-scale works offered the 13 Interview.14 Deborah Cullen, ed., Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture, 1902-1936 (New York: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2014), 11-12.15 Interview. 16 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 12.17 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 12.
5
distinct advantage that it avoided any conflicts with notions of
femininity.
Miniatures did not require the same physical labor as life-
size statues, and because she had no need of human models she did
not run the risk of being seen as transgressive in her studio
practices. They were also cast in bronze rather than sculpted in
stone, meaning that once Anna Hyatt had made the clay model for a
statue she could have it shipped to the foundry and reproduced,
in some cases hundreds of times, without any additional physical
effort.18 Because these small statues were primarily displayed
in homes, they also carried with them connotations of
domesticity, underscored by the fact that many of Hyatt’s works
were adapted into functional domestic objects, such as letter-
openers and bookends.19 The fact that Anna Hyatt built her
professional reputation on miniatures of animals also meant that
she was dealing with universally acceptable subject matter, even
though many of her compositions showed the violence of the
natural world.
Throughout the early phase of her career, Anna Hyatt’s
18 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 12.19 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 12.
6
partnership with fine metal companies like Shreve, Crump & Low
and Gorham & Company had the added benefit that she could simply
produce works in the privacy of her studio then send them to the
company to sell on her behalf.20 She did not need to solicit
commissions or cultivate patrons- endeavors that could easily be
seen as overly aggressive or ambitious for a woman- and instead
could maintain a high level of privacy about her working habits,
projecting the ideal of feminine modesty by her lack of a public
persona. In fact, she was so private that despite Archer
Huntington’s interest in Anna Hyatt’s career, it was not until
the two met to discuss a medal commission for the Hispanic
Society that they realized they had been seeing each other on the
same train into town for weeks.21
While she was not an openly public figure, Anna Hyatt was
keenly aware of the necessity of exhibiting at the Paris Salon in
order to build a reputation as a professional artist, so between
1906 and 1910 she made trips to France for several extended
sojourns.22 She was accompanied on these trips by her sister
20 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 12.21 Mary Mitchell and Albert Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, Archer and Anna: Chronicle of a Marriage (Newtown, CT: Budd Drive Press, 2004), 17.22 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 15.
7
Harriet and her sister’s children, and Anna’s nephew A. Hyatt
Mayor described the process by which the two women searched for a
place for Anna to work:
[Aunt Anna] wanted a summer studio which would be cheap and on the ground floor so you could wheel in heavy sculpture. So she and my mother took a train to the end of the line. Every time the trained slowed down they looked out and they would see, you know, those silvered globes in the gardens. They would see a factory roof. Finally the train slowed down to a little village where roses were growing over the garden walls and thatches. Beyond there were bachelor buttons and poppies in the field. It was just beautiful. So they got out. And they asked the chef de gare if he had anykind of barracks or shed that would serve as a studio. And he said, “Mesdames, nous n’avons que des ateliers.” They had landedin Auvers-sur-Oise where Van Gogh shot himself, where Pisarro painted, where Cézanne painted. And they hired the studio of Daubigny whose backyard had been painted by Van Gogh.23
It was in this historic yet appropriately domestic setting that
Anna Hyatt began work on the pieces she would submit to the Paris
Salon, and ultimately where she would undertake the sculpture
that would lead to her first monumental commission.24
While she was in France in 1909, the Catholic Church issued
a decree of beatification for Joan of Arc, sparking an immense
surge of interest in the saint in both France and in the United
23 A. Hyatt Mayor and Paul Cummings, “An Interview with A. Hyatt Mayor,” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 4 (1978): 2.24 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 15.
8
States.25 Having read Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,
published in 1896, Anna was finally inspired by Joan’s
beatification to sculpt the saint.26 She later told an
interviewer that “[e]very French sculptor has done his Joan of
Arc, and is sure to, so that she’d been done in light of every
imaginable form as far as I could see. And my challenge was to
get a composition that was original, that hadn’t really been done
before. That was the fun of it.”27
With her characteristic enthusiasm, she began conducting
research on Joan in Rouen, then went to work on a life-size
equestrian statue of the heroine in her studio in Auvers-sur-Oise
to be exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1910.28 This statue caused
quite a stir at the Salon, garnering much attention in French
newspapers and earning her an honorable mention from the Salon
jury.29 The jury claimed that the only reason they did not award
her the medal of honor is because it was impossible for a woman
to make such a large statue on her own, to which one critic
responded that “[e]veryone knew that that was only an excuse for 25 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 60.26 Interview.27 Interview.28 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 60; Interview. 29 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 60.
9
not giving the medal to a woman, particularly a woman who was not
a native to France.”30
Meanwhile, back in New York the renewed interest in Joan of
Arc had prompted the creation of a Joan of Arc monument
committee, with the purpose of raising funds for a statue of the
saint in honor of her 500th birthday in 1912.31 The committee had
the additional goal of fostering friendship between France and
the United States, a goal that became all the more urgent on the
eve of World War I.32 The leader of the committee was J. Sanford
Saltus, an executive at Tiffany & Company, who was traveling
throughout Europe looking for the perfect Joan to bring back to
New York.33 He saw Anna Hyatt’s Joan of Arc at the Paris Salon and
recommended her to the committee, who interviewed her after she
returned to the United States in 1911 and asked her if she would
recreate her Joan for New York’s Riverside Drive.34 This would not
only be New York’s first statue of a historical woman, but the
first public statue in New York to be sculpted by a woman (Fig. 30 Pasachnik, “Capturing the Wild,” 60.31 Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists, 1830-1930 (Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987), 247.32 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 177.33 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 16; Interview.34 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 177; Interview.
10
1).35
With such a high profile commission, Anna Hyatt had to
carefully manage her reputation through every step of the
creation process. Her usual strategy of minimizing the
appearance of her labor had worked well to sell her miniatures
but had cost her the medal of honor at the Paris Salon, so she
adopted a new way of presenting herself to safeguard her
credibility. The New York version of Joan of Arc would be made
“life and a quarter” size, emphatically erasing any remaining
doubts as to whether or not she had been physically capable of
producing the original, life-size Joan on her own.36 Anna Hyatt’s
increasing consciousness of her projected public image is
reflected in the portrait (Fig. 2) produced by her friend,
painter Marion Boyd Allen, in 1915:
Adamant that her portraits fulfill their purpose as faithfullikenesses, Allen captured Hyatt in action, allowing the sculptor to work shaping her clay model during their session. Thus Hyatt assumed a customary pose, one foot resting on the stand that holds her model. She holds her wire loop in one hand, and manipulates the clay with her other, raptly absorbed in her creative process. Allen laterremembered that Hyatt had asked her to repaint the arms in
35 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 177.36 Interview.
11
this portrait to display her actual muscular strength.37
Anna Hyatt also emphasized the intellectual labor that went
into the creation of the Joan of Arc. Anna told many stories about
how she spent a great deal of time before the completion of the
first Joan searching for an appropriate horse to carry her
heroine into battle, as she needed one that was massive yet
energetic.38 In Paris, she persuaded the Magasin de Beaux Arts
to let her into their stables so she might sketch their delivery
horses while an assistant trotted them up and down for her.39
According to Anna Hyatt, the store was quite proud of the fine
horses they had and “finally they sent a very handsome horse to
[her] studio,” which was large enough that she could actually
bring the horse inside to study it in great detail.40 This study
enabled her to closely capture the anatomy of the horse,
increasing the level of credibility the statue committee hoped
she would achieve.
The armor was another important intellectual component of
the Joan of Arc. “Everyone from the committee’s official historian 37 Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 117.38 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 15.39 Interview.40 Interview.
12
to the most casual critics said that the historical accuracy of
Joan’s armor was essential to the sculpture’s significance,” and
Bashford Dean, the legendary curator and founder of the
Metropolitan’s Arms and Armor department, was credited with
providing the research that was so vital the project.41 It has
only recently been revealed that this was almost entirely untrue,
as it was a group of committee members, not Anna Hyatt, who had
sought Dean’s advice, and Dean delegated most of the actual
research to an assistant.42 It has also recently been observed
that consultation with Dean would not have helped improve the
armor’s accuracy much, owing to the fact that his writings about
15th century armor were based as much on his own imagination as
much as they were on actual evidence.43 Whatever his
contributions may have been, the changes in the armor between the
1910 and 1915 versions of Joan of Arc were minimal, but Anna Hyatt
never attempted to diminish Dean’s role in the project.44
Rather, it seems she saw the benefits of having her statue
connected to the legendary Dean, an association that would have
41 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 16.42 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 16.43 Cullen, Goddess, Heroine, Beast, 16.44 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 178.
13
added to the intellectual weight of the monument.45
When Joan of Arc was finally unveiled in December 1915, it
could not have been a greater success. The statue was so popular
that four additional full-sized castings were made and placed in
Blois, France; Gloucester, Massachusetts; the Plains of Abraham
in Quebec; and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor;
additionally, numerous copies of the middle-sized statues (about
50 inches tall) she had made as preliminary models were cast and
sold to private collectors.46 Male and female critics alike
found the Joan of Arc to be a superb monument, but the terms of
their praise revealed a great divide in the way Anna Hyatt was
perceived, and thus the great skill she had at negotiating her
reputation with the expectations of various audiences. Exemplary
of these viewpoints are the reviews by Charles Caffin and Grace
Humphries, both published within six months of the statue’s
unveiling.
Caffin’s review, titled “Miss Hyatt’s Statue of Joan of
Arc,” is littered with evidence of his assumptions about women’s
artistic abilities. His choice to refer to the artist as “Miss
45 Higonnet, “Wild at Heart,” 178.46 Tufts, American Women Artists, 247.
14
Hyatt” is a rather telling precursor to the rest of the piece, as
he begins by somewhat discrediting her achievements. According
to Caffin, Anna Hyatt had escaped “[m]any of the difficulties
that usually confront the sculptor of an equestrian statue in
this country” because the Joan of Arc statue committee had not
been concerned with the accuracy of Joan’s appearance or costume
as would be the case with a memorial to a modern general.47
Caffin’s telling clearly ignores the great lengths to which the
committee had gone in order to gain Bashford Dean’s approval of
Joan’s armor, and simply mentions it as something “interesting to
note.”48 Even though he credits Anna Hyatt with “creating one of
the few really monumental, impressive, and expressive equestrian
statues of modern times,” he downplays her achievement in being
the first woman to produce a public monument for New York by
remarking that he could “recall no other instance of a woman
sculptor being [e]ntrusted with a commission so important.”49
Caffin also uses highly gendered terms to describe the
figures in the piece. The horse Joan rides is characterized by
47 Charles Caffin, “Miss Hyatt’s Statue of Joan of Arc,” The Century 92, no. 2 (1915): 309.48 Caffin, “Miss Hyatt’s Statue,” 311.49 Caffin, “Miss Hyatt’s Statue,” 309.
15
“vigorous movement” which simulates “the rise of a wave to its
crest” and “serves as a foundation of magnificent physical power
to the frail, slender figure” of Joan, who pose is likened to
“some frail tendril growth toward the light.”50 Caffin explains
Hyatt’s ability to capture both of these figures with such skill
as being the result of her sympathies with both the horse and
Joan’s spiritual qualities, in addition to her natural “womanly
intuition of the Maid’s character.”51
Grace Humphries takes a markedly different approach in her
piece, titled “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue.” Humphries is keenly
aware of the historical significance of this commission having
been given to a woman, and works to heighten the monumentality of
this achievement by describing the statue committee’s selection
process in great detail. Before even mentioning Anna Hyatt’s
name, Humphries narrates the painstaking process by which the
committee went about selecting the perfect design for the statue:
“[t]wo years were spent in seeing statues and designs, paintings
and drawings, in looking up all matters relating to the maid,”
and despite many suggestions to the contrary, the committee held
50 Caffin, “Miss Hyatt’s Statue,” 309-310.51 Caffin, “Miss Hyatt’s Statue,” 309-310.
16
firmly to their decision that “the designs were to be considered
absolutely on their merit” without regards to the gender or
nationality of the artists submitting them.52 Humphries also
emphasizes the scholarly work that went into the design of the
statue, noting that in the absence of a complete suit of armor
from the 15th century, “the details were supplied to Miss Hyatt
from drawings only- rubbings of old tombs, old paintings, figures
in stone and bronze were studied” to ensure the accuracy of
Joan’s armor, and the result was that the finished product was
absolutely convincing to all who saw it.53
All of this discussion of the process in planning the Joan of
Arc builds to Humphries’ final discussion of the true significance
of Anna Hyatt’s statue:
The unveiling of the statue is not only a triumph for the sculptor. It is of great importance to women. For it is the first and only heroic equestrian statue ever created by a woman. Coming near, as it assuredly does, to being the greatest equestrian statue in America, Miss Hyatt’s success is an opening wedge for women in this field of work. Frequently, sculptors of talent and ability have been refused important commissions, merely for the fact that theyare women. Gradually opinion changes and when, in the future, great pieces of sculpture are competed for by women,
52 Grace Humphries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” The International Studio LVII, no. 226 (1915): XLVII-XLVIII.53 Humphries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” L.
17
and successfully, Miss Hyatt will be recognized as the pioneer, the blazer of the trail. But it is to be kept in mind that her Jeanne D’Arc won the coveted commission judgedby an absolute standard.54
Humphries also differs from Caffin in avoiding gendered
language to describe the statue, choosing to refer to the figure
of Joan as “dignified” rather than slender or frail, and she also
gives Anna Hyatt a great deal more autonomy in the design by
including the artist’s own words in the piece.55 She quotes Anna
Hyatt saying of the original statue that enlarging it was “a
terribly brutal piece of work; massing on three and a half tons
of clay does entail great physical labor.”56 She again quotes
Hyatt discussing the way she chose to depict Joan, wanting to
show that it was “only her mental attitude, only her religious
fervour, that could have enabled her to endure so much
physically.”57 Humphries’ goal is clear: by extolling Anna
Hyatt’s great achievement and capability as a sculptor of
monuments, she hoped to prove that all women could rise to the
same task if given the right chance.
54 Humphries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” L.55 Humphries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” XLVIII.56 Humphries, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” XLVIII.57 Humprhies, “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue,” XLVIII.
18
Despite the popularity and critical success of the Joan of Arc,
Anna Hyatt would not produce another public monument until nearly
twelve years later, after her marriage to Archer Huntington.
Their marriage initiated a new phase in Anna’s career, as
Archer’s combined devotion to the arts and philanthropic ventures
allowed her new opportunities and freedoms to create large-scale
works as complements to these ventures. The status of these
works as philanthropic gifts removed the pressure for Anna to
prove herself, as well as removing the risk of commercial failure
if her works did not meet public starts of feminine artistic
propriety.
Archer Huntington’s stepfather was the industrial tycoon
Collis Huntington, and his mother Arabella was one of the most
important art collectors in New York.58 With the combined
business acumen and artistic sensibilities he was taught by his
parents, Archer “became a dominant player in America’s cultural
development in the first half of the twentieth century.”59 When
he met Anna Hyatt in 1921, Archer had already established his
58 Linda Brazeau, “‘The Visionaries’: Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington- Patrons of American Sculpture,” PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2002: 12.59 Brazeau, “‘The Visionaries,’” 60.
19
famous Audubon Terrace, a complex of institutions that included
the Hispanic Society’s museum and library, the American
Numismatic Society, the American Geographical Society, and the
Museum of the American Indian.60 As mentioned above, he had
asked Anna Hyatt to create a medal for the Hispanic Society in
1921, during which time she wrote that it was “an unusual
stimulus to work for one whose gifts and taste promise the
keenest judgment and appreciation.”61 As might be expected for
two of New York’s cultural giants, after this initial meeting the
two quickly grew fond of each other.62
Like much of the rest of Anna Hyatt’s early career, her
wedding with Archer Huntington was a decidedly private affair.
Held in Anna’s studio on March 10, 1923, it was attended only by
a small group of close relatives and friends.63 Their wedding
date was also on the day they happened to share a birthday, when
Anna turned 47 and Archer turned 54.64 Anna and Archer
Huntington would remain happily married until Archer’s death in
1955. Thanks in part to his support of professional women and 60 Brazeau, “‘The Visionaries,’” 68, 74-75, 77-78.61 Brazeau, “‘The Visionaries,’” 106.62 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 17-18.63 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 19.64 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 13.
20
his abundant wealth, the only hindrance to Anna’s career after
their marriage was a case of tuberculosis that she contracted in
1927, which would periodically restrict her ability to work
throughout the rest of her life.65
Upon returning from their honeymoon, Archer and Anna decided
to embark on their first project together: Anna was going to
create a statue of El Cid Campeador, the famous Spanish war hero
of the 11th century, which the couple would present as a gift to
Spain at the International Exposition in the spring of 1929.66
El Cid was a special figure for Archer, as just prior to their
marriage he had completed a ten-year-long project to translate an
epic poem about the life of El Cid from Castilian into English,
an achievement for which he was granted honorary degrees by Yale,
Harvard, and Columbia universities.67 Once Anna had read his
translation and “saw what a magnificent figure it was to do,” she
immediately decided that El Cid would be the most fitting subject
for a statue with which to express Archer’s gratitude to Spain
for having given him such a rich focus for his life.68
65 Interview; Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 22-23.66 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 21.67 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 22.68 Interview; Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 21.
21
Having already proven herself capable of executing an
equestrian statue on a larger-than-life scale, and being
commissioned for the adornment of a public cultural institution,
Anna Hyatt Huntington’s El Cid was received with great enthusiasm
by the public, and critics never questioned the propriety of a
woman sculpting such a dynamic monument (Fig. 3). Some even
suggested that it was a better work than the Joan of Arc: the critic
Parks Kineton noted in 1934 that “her monument to ‘The Cid’ was
truly monumental,” in contrast to the Joan of Arc, which was “truly
decorative.”69 After the first casting of El Cid was installed in
Seville, Spain, a second was placed in the courtyard of the
Hispanic Society, and Anna Hyatt Huntington went to work on four
large warrior figures and the bases of two flagpoles to accompany
the Hispanic Society’s El Cid.70
From this point onward the pair always worked together on
philanthropic pursuits, and Anna was free to contribute
monumental sculptures to these projects as she wished, having no
further need to wait for commissions before designing large-scale
compositions. One of their most famous projects was the founding
69 Kineton, “American Sculptress of Animals,” 65.70 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 29-30.
22
of Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, America’s first public
sculpture garden.71 The garden’s first sculptural inhabitants
were pieces that Anna donated to the project, but as the
Depression years progressed the couple decided to focus on
supporting struggling artists by purchasing their work instead.72
At the same time that they were working on Brookgreen Gardens,
the Huntingtons also founded the Mariners’ Museum in Newport
News, Virginia, in honor of the shipyard that Collis P.
Huntington had established in the city.73 This museum was
located on a 1,000 acre park, which in contrast to Brookgreen
only featured three sculptures: two lions to decorate the bridge,
and a monument to Collis alternately referred to as Youth Taming
the Wild or Conquering the Wild, erected in 1934 (Fig. 4).74
While there is not much written record about the statue, it
is clear from a visual comparison to El Cid that Anna’s artistic
expression had undergone a significant transformation in the
seven years that had passed between the completion of these two
pieces. Anna had always portrayed her subjects in motion, but 71 Robin R. Salmon, “The Huntingtons: A Legacy of Giving,” Sculpture Review 54, no. 1 (2005): 17.72 Salmon, “A Legacy of Giving,” 18.73 Salmon, “A Legacy of Giving,” 16.74 Mitchell and Goodrich, The Remarkable Huntingtons, 88.
23
now she was able to experiment with a bold and expressive
dynamism verging on abstraction.75 The same year that Youth Taming
the Wild was erected, a critic remarked that although “Anna Hyatt
Huntington is a good and vigorous artist in her own right; of
late her work appears to have lost some of its sincere directness
in a search for some mystic expression, which true lovers of art
deplore.”76 Anna Hyatt Huntington, however, had grown confident
enough from the support of her husband that she no longer
depended on the approval of such critics.
At the time of her death in 1973, Anna Hyatt Huntington left
behind a legacy that few women in the 20th century could have
hoped for. At a surprisingly young age she had become the most
successful woman artist of her time, and despite her marriage and
the advent of Modernism she remained an enormously popular artist
throughout the rest of her career. Using the domestic
connotations of miniatures and the philanthropic potential of
large-scale sculpture to her advantage, Anna Hyatt Huntington had
the extraordinary ability to command the art market and public
75 Robin R. Salmon, “Man and Horse in the Work of Anna Hyatt Huntington: Two Examples.” Sculpture Review 55, no. 2 (2006): 26.76 Jeanne d’Ucel, Review of Le Musicisme Sculptural, by Jean Royere, Books Abroad 8, no. 4 (1934): 427.
24
opinion before becoming independent of those forces, making her
free to become a master of both miniatures and monuments.
Illustrations
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Figure 1. Anna Vaughn Hyatt. Joan of Arc, 1915. Bronze, Mohegan granite; 20 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 1 in. x 12 ft. 3 in. Riverside Parkat 93rd Street. Collection of the City of New York.
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Figure 2. Marion Boyd Allen. Portrait of Anna Vaughn Hyatt, 1915. Oil on canvas; 65 x 40 in. Collection Maier Museum of Art at RandolphCollege, Lynchburg, VA.
Figure 3. Anna Hyatt Huntington. El Cid, 1927. Bronze; 12 2/3 ft. Seville, Spain.
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Figure 4. Anna Hyatt Huntington. Conquering the Wild, 1934. Limestone; 13 1/3 ft. Mariners’ Museum Park, Newport News, VA.
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Bibliography
Brazeau, Linda. “‘The Visionaries’: Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington- Patrons of American Sculpture.” PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2002.
Caffin, Charles H. “Miss Hyatt’s Statue of Joan of Arc.” The Century 92, no. 2 (1915): 309-311.
Cullen, Deborah, ed. Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture, 1902-1936. New York: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2014.
D’Ucel, Jeanne. Review of Le Musicisme Sculptural, by Jean Royere. Books Abroad 8, no. 4 (1934): 427.
Eden, Myrna G. Energy and Individuality in the Art of Anna Huntington, Sculptor and Amy Beach, Composer. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987.
Higonnet, Anne. “Wild at Heart: Rediscovering the Sculpture of Hyatt Huntington.” Magazine Antiques 181, no. 1 (2014): 174-181.
Hill, May Brawley. The Woman Sculptor: Malvina Hoffman and Her Contemporaries. New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1984.
Huntington, Anna Hyatt. Anna Hyatt Huntington. New York: W.W. Norton, 1947.
Humphries, Grace. “Anna Vaughn Hyatt’s Statue.” The International Studio LVII, no. 226 (1915): XLVII– L.
Kineton, Parks. “American Sculptress of Animals: Anna Hyatt Huntington.” Apollo 16 (1932): 61-66.
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Mayor, A. Hyatt, and Paul Cummings. “An Interview with A. Hyatt Mayor.” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 4 (1978): 2-19.
Mitchell, Mary, and Albert Goodrich. The Remarkable Huntingtons, Archer and Anna: Chronicle of a Marriage. Newtown, CT: Budd Drive Press, 2004.
Oral History Interview with Anna Hyatt-Huntington, circa 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Pasachnik, Lisa. “Capturing the Wild: Anna Vaughn Hyatt, Sculptor.” Style 1900 13, no. 4 (2000: 56-61).
Salmon, Robin R. “The Huntingtons: A Legacy of Giving.” Sculpture Review 54, no. 1 (2005: 16-21).
________. “Man and Horse in the Work of Anna Hyatt Huntington: Two Examples.” Sculpture Review 55, no. 2 (2006: 26-29).
Tufts, Eleanor. American Women Artists, 1830-1930. Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museumof Women in the Arts, 1987.
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