Anna Hyatt Huntington was the foremost female sculptor of her time, producing everything from small medals to monumental works. Though best known for her equestrian monuments, Huntington launched her career with small animal subjects. Hyatt Huntington’s fascination with animals was formed over many visits to the zoo with her father, a professor of paleontology and zoology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her animal sculptures are noted for their action, energy, verve, subtlety, and realism. As one critic wrote, “Anna Hyatt Huntington displays some of her living animals which are surpassed only by the great Hellenistic masters of animal life. Every beast seems to have waited for this American lady to give it soul.”1
Like her pouncing, fighting, attacking, howling, and—in the case of the Gallup New Deal Art collection—braying animals, as well as her armor-clad version of Joan of Arc, the artist herself was, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with. (Indeed, Hyatt Huntington once went as Joan of Arc, in full armor and riding a white horse, to a charity ball event.) By 1912, at the age of thirty-six, she was among the highest-paid professional women in the United States. In 1932, she was among the earliest women artists to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Over the course of her career, she received numerous awards and honors. After her 1923 marriage to philanthropist Archer Huntington, the son of railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington, Hyatt Huntington became a leading patron of American sculpture. With her husband, she established and designed the country’s first public outdoor sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, in 1931. Her sculptures are in the permanent collections of more than 200 museums across the United States as well as overseas.