Alpheus Hyatt

Huntington, Anna Hyatt (1876–1973). American sculptor of animal subjects in a traditional style. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, daughter of the eminent palaeontologist Alpheus Hyatt, who was also an amateur painter. Her love of animals was nurtured by childhood summers spent on a farm in Maryland and she became an expert horsewoman; she said that ‘animals have many moods, and to represent them is my joy'. Although she studied briefly at the Art Students League, New York, under Gutzon Borglum, she was primarily self-taught. She had her first one-woman exhibition at the Boston Arts Club in 1900. From 1907 to 1911 she travelled in Europe, winning an honourable mention at the 1910 Paris Salon for an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (an enlarged version in bronze was erected on Riverside Drive, New York, in 1915). In 1923 she married Archer M. Huntington (1870–1955), a poet, scholar of Spanish literature, and philanthropist (he was the son of a railroad magnate and the cousin (later also step-son) of Henry E. Huntington, who created the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery at San Marino, California). In 1908 Archer had founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York; he commissioned Sorolla y Bastida to paint murals for the interior of the Society and a large equestrian statue of El Cid by Anna stands outside (another cast was erected in Seville in 1927). The Huntingtons collaborated on various philanthropic projects, including schemes for protecting wild animals, and in 1931 they founded Brookgreen Gardens, near Charleston, South Carolina. Originally they envisaged this as a nature retreat and a sculpture garden for Anna's work, but they also collected and commissioned sculpture by other artists for it. By this time, having been weakened by tuberculosis, she was generally concentrating on smaller pieces. She won many awards, including being made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Alpheus Hyatt 1838-1902, American zoologist, b. Washington, D.C., grad. Harvard, 1862. He was a devoted follower of Louis Agassiz. From 1870, Hyatt was custodian and later curator of the Boston Society of Natural History. He also taught zoology and paleontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1870-88) and at Boston Univ. (1877-1902). At the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology he built up a remarkable collection of fossil cephalopods; his discoveries contributed to the knowledge of their evolution. He wrote extensively on the cephalopods, sponges, and other subjects. Hyatt helped to establish the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.