Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Photos by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
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Intended as decoration for the pedestals of the bronze flagpole bases Huntington sculpted for the Hispanic Society of America, these portrait plaques have been preserved in storage for nearly ninety years after changes in the designs for the Hispanic Society of America’s courtyard left them unused. They reflect Huntington’s close collaboration with her husband, the renowned philanthropist and Hispanist Archer Milton Huntington, shortly after their marriage in 1923. Correspondence held by the archives of the Hispanic Society and Syracuse University indicates that the pair began to discuss the sculptural program of the courtyard in 1921 and that the overall plan for the space had been settled on by at least early 1925. In keeping with the decidedly Spanish theme of the broader plan, all but two of the plaques depict important Iberian figures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and each one of them was based on the work of artists resident in Spain.
The prosaically named Head of an Old Man and Head of a Woman have their sources, respectively, in a retablo in Barcelona (now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya) and a Catalan triptych in a Berlin museum. All of the titled heads except that of Isabel the Catholic were modeled on funereal images in Burgos, Spain. It is probable that Archer played some role in the decision to use these particular depictions as models; he had visited Burgos and written about it at length in A Note-Book in Northern Spain, an account of his travels in 1898. The precedent for Isabel the Catholic, given only as “portrait” in the records of the Hispanic Society, was clearly Juan de Flandes’s Portrait of Isabel the Catholic (ca. 1490) held by the Royal Palace of El Pardo (or one of its many contemporary variants, another is in the Prado). –DR |