Qualla: Anna Hyatt Huntington

Anna Hyatt Huntington: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bain, Public domain. Her first sculpture teacher in Boston, Henry Hudson Kitson, threw her out of his studio after she pointed out that his horses' anatomy was wrong. She was right about the horses. Anna Vaughn Hyatt had grown up around them, in stables and zoos and at the field stations where her father - a paleontology and zoology professor at Harvard and MIT - took her along to study live and fossil animals. By the time Kitson banished her she already knew more about equine musculature than most working sculptors in New England. She would spend the next seventy years proving it, animal by bronze animal, all the way from the Bronx Zoo to a low-country plantation in South Carolina that became, under her hands, the largest outdoor sculpture garden in America.

Read more: Anna Hyatt Huntington on Qualla

Image: Bain | Public domain

Anna Hyatt Huntington: First in New York

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. After leaving Kitson she studied with Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Gutzon Borglum at the Art Students League, but most of her real training happened in zoos and circuses with a sketchbook on her knee. By the time she was forty, her animal sculptures combined precise anatomy with wha...

Read more: Anna Hyatt Huntington on Qualla

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain

Anna Hyatt Huntington: Brookgreen

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hisland7, Public domain. On her forty-seventh birthday in 1923, she married Archer Milton Huntington, heir to one of the great American railroad fortunes and a serious Hispanophile scholar. Together they had the means - and the temperament - to build institutions. In 1929 they bought four contiguous ante...

Read more: Anna Hyatt Huntington on Qualla

Image: Hisland7 | Public domain

Anna Hyatt Huntington: The Last Statue

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chili555, CC BY-SA 3.0. She fought tuberculosis for a decade after contracting it in 1927 and recovered. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1932, one of the earliest women so honored. She kept working into her nineties. In 1956, a sixth-grade class at Rice Elementary School i...

Read more: Anna Hyatt Huntington on Qualla

Image: Chili555 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anna Hyatt Huntington: What Remains

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anna Hyatt Huntington, Public domain. Anna Hyatt Huntington's bronzes stand in Central Park (her José Martí, leaning forward in the saddle as if he can already see Cuba); in front of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco; in Seville and in Buenos Aires (her El Cid); at Stevens Institute and Stanford and the Mariners' ...

Read more: Anna Hyatt Huntington on Qualla

Image: Anna Hyatt Huntington | Public domain