| Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington | ||
| Birth Date: March 10, 1876 |
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| Death Date: October 4, 1973 Artist Gallery |
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| Anna Hyatt Huntington focused her artistic talents on the depiction of animal life. Huntington’s earlier work consisted of mainly of depictions of domestic animals, only later moving toward subjects there 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 the exposure to his profession that she first developed what was to be a lifelong interest in animals.
Huntington studied sculpture in Boston and later enrolled at the Art Students 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.
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. Freed as well from the need to produce work for sale, Huntington donated many of her works to museums around the country.
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