Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington
(American, 1876–1973)
Horses Backing
1905
cast bronze, 11 x 10 1/2" x 9 1/2"
Gift of the Artist
Like Rosa Bonheur – but
American and of a successive generation – Anna Hyatt
Huntington focused her artistic talents on the depiction of
animal life. Also like Bonheur, Huntington’s earlier
work consisted mainly of depictions of domestic animals, only
later moving toward subjects that were more wild and exotic.
Her father, Alpheus Hyatt, was a Harvard professor of paleontology
and curator of the Boston Society of Natural History, and it
was as a result of exposure to his profession that she first
developed what was to be a lifelong interest in animals. She
studied sculpture in Boston with Henry Kittleson, and later
enrolled at the Art Student’s League in New York. During
this time Huntington also frequented the Bronx Zoo, where she
sketched and modeled animals from life. Like so many American
artists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she traveled to
Europe to work and study. Her work was well received there,
and she was awarded the Purple Rosette of the French Government,
and made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur for her
equestrian group of Joan of Arc. In 1923, Hyatt married the
wealthy philanthropist Archer Huntington, and in 1931 he purchased
a ten thousand-acre estate near Charleston, South Carolina,
afterwards known as Brookgreen Gardens, as a home and studio
for his wife. Secluded from urban life, Huntington was extremely
prolific, and went on to produce hundreds of models which were
cast in bronze, even experimenting with the relatively new
sculptural material of cast aluminum. Freed as well from the
need to produce work for sale, Huntington donated many of her
works to museums around the country, including the work now
in the Tweed collection. In 1936, Brookgreen Gardens was donated
to the state of South Carolina, and is now open to the public
as a sculpture park. Dated 1905, Horses Backing belongs to
an earlier phase of Huntington’s career. The work was
created only two years following her inclusion in a major exhibition
at the Society of American Artists, where she was represented
by a similar sculpture of two horses titled Winter. Horses
Backing reveals the artist’s particular interest in the
dynamics of animals in motion. Huntington used her talent at
realistic anatomical modeling to capture the strain of muscles,
limbs and joints, creating a work that speaks of potential
energy, forever frozen in time. That the horses are backing,
rather than running forward, lends a unique twist to this time-honored
animal subject, which ironically magnifies the implication
of their strength. |
