Cast of the Hand of Anna Hyatt Huntington, cast 1935. Aluminum, 12 7/8 x 4 9/16 x 2 1/2 in. | 32.7 x 11.6 x 6.4 cm). Signed on tool: Anna Hyatt Huntington; marked on bottom: A.H.H. Foundry mark: none; cast by Gargani & Sons. Collection The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY (D881). Photo by Mark Ostrander, courtesy The Wallach Art Gallery.
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Tools for Understanding Anna Hyatt Huntington’s Hands: Scratching the Surface of the Sculptor’s PersonaBy Margot Bernstein “In the art of sculpture . . . it is left to the artist to make out of many things one thing, and from the smallest part of a thing an entirety.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 1965.1 The aluminum cast hands of Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), her husband, Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955), and her father-in-law, Collis Potter Huntington (1821-1900), represent fragments of the human form. Their meaning, however, constitutes an entirety of the type Rainer Maria Rilke describes. Cast in 1935, these uncannily lifelike sculptural renderings of the human hand, exhibited in Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture, 1902–1936 for the first time in their history, are not merely synecdochic substitutes for the bodies of the people to whom they belong. Rather, they are visible manifestations of the artist’s personal and professional personae. Anna Hyatt Huntington’s aluminum cast hands descend from a long line of painted and sculptural depictions of isolated or fragmented parts of the human body. Sculptural renderings of human body parts have been produced for centuries. Reliquaries shaped like human arms, heads, and other parts of the body were common in the Middle Ages. Fragmentary ruins of antique sculpture served as inspiration for artists of the Italian Renaissance period. Life casts (and works of sculpture made from these casts) have long served a didactic function, for students of drawing, painting, and sculpture have traditionally studied these objects as part of their artistic training. Casts taken from dissected parts of the body have also provided artists with valuable insight into internal anatomical details, the knowledge and observation of which often enhance depictions of the human form.2 Historically, artists who used life casts as the basis for finished works of sculpture were decried as cheaters. They were considered copyists whose lack of imagination and inventiveness made them unworthy of the name ‘artist.’ Even Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), a famous French sculptor with whose work Hyatt Huntington was most certainly familiar, was accused of being a copyist as the late nineteenth-century debate about the status of life casts escalated. Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (modeled in 1876), a naturalistic sculpture of a male nude, was poorly received by critics because it appeared to replicate (rather than improve upon) nature. Deeply affected by this criticism, Rodin abandoned what Daniel Rosenfeld has termed “anatomical verisimilitude and refinement of detail,” developing the more approximate and expressive style for which the artist is now well known.3 Rodin’s numerous studies of hands in clay, plaster, marble, and bronze had garnered considerable attention because of their expressive capacities long before Anna Hyatt Huntington visited France.4 Rodin’s sculptural renderings of human hands, whether preparatory studies or the severed limbs of completed sculptures whose expressiveness he hoped to increase by way of fragmentation, filled his studio drawers. Although Anna Hyatt Huntington was inspired by Rodin’s work (and perhaps even by his hand sculptures), she was less influenced by an expressive tradition including, in varying styles and media, Rodin and Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), than she was by a more American realistic tradition.5 On this side of the Atlantic, sculptures of hands abounded. The American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is one among many artists to have created hand sculptures. In her discussion of Eakins’ anatomical casts, Kathleen A. Foster has explained that the first works that Eakins cast, which were taken from dissection, exemplify “his most didactic genre . . . these casts were made in a neutral, ‘scientific’ style to communicate information with maximum authority and objectivity.”6 That these casts were labeled in Latin further emphasizes their function as educational tools for understanding and accurately rendering individual parts of the human form.7 Eakins’ own hand was immortalized by Samuel Murray, who made his Life Cast of the Right Hand of Thomas Eakins in 1894. Were it not for the cast’s abrupt end just below the subject’s wrist, one might easily confuse this lifelike work with Eakins’ actual hand. The cast of Eakins’ hand, as well as that of his sister, Margaret, and his nephew, William J. Crowell, indicate that casts of parts of the human body did not have an exclusively didactic function. Instead, they may be interpreted as an alternative type of portrait.8 That a cast of a body part could serve as a portrait was well established by the time Samuel Murray created his life cast. Indeed, the American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805-1872) had made a plaster cast of his infant daughter Loulie’s hand six months following her birth on September 10, 1838.9 Powers’ artisan carvers made a marble version of this cast “as a surprise and a gift for him,” making evident the personal significance that this work had for Powers.10 Other commissions awarded Powers further illustrate the extent to which nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans viewed casts of family members as commemorative objects that celebrated children, parents, and siblings in life, or, alternatively, paid tribute to the deceased.11 The artist was not, however, the only person who desired a copy of Loulie’s Hand. William H. Gerdts has commented that “its appeal obviously went beyond the immediate family, since replicas were owned by others, including members of the nobility of England and Prussia. Captain John Grant, the purchaser of the first Greek Slave [perhaps Powers’ best known sculpture, which depicts a nude female slave in chains] owned two.”12 Also in this tradition belong the Closed Right Hand of Hiram Powers and Right Hand and Wrist of Hiram Powers (the latter of which was used as a study for the artist’s statue of Daniel Webster). These works all put Anna Hyatt Huntington’s cast hands in context.13 The hands of a couple also had precedents. The Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908) serve not only as portraits of their sitters, the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but also as an allusion to the intimacy shared by this couple. Hosmer created the original plaster casts of this work on her first trip to Rome, where she met the Brownings. Lauretta Dimmick writes of Hosmer’s sculpture, “this intimate piece is eloquent testimony to the profound love between the Brownings, who had eloped to Italy seven years earlier, as well as to the affection between the Brownings and Hosmer.”14 Margaret Wendell LaBarre has written that, “in comparison with her highly idealized works, Miss Hosmer let the hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning appear in a very realistic manner, for small—and to some extent, disfiguring (but revealing)—details were not smoothed away. The large knuckles of Mrs. Browning’s rather unattractive hand were not omitted, nor were the series of veins that trace both hands.” LaBarre further observes that the band of lace at Mrs. Browning’s wrist “adds a feminine note to an otherwise unfeminine hand . . . the husband’s hand grasps the wife’s paternally, hers resting inside his, probably symbolizing the tone of the Browning relationship as Harriet Hosmer saw it.”15 Hosmer further addressed the affection between husband and wife already hinted at by the position of the Brownings’ hands in written form; the artist wrote of the Brownings, ‘‘Parted by death,’ we say— . . . / . . ./ [Yet] hand in hand they wend their eternal way.”16 The Hosmer hands thus function not only as individual portraits of their sitters, but also as a metaphoric portrait of their everlasting bond which, the artist suggests, would persist beyond the grave. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ bronze casts of Abraham Lincoln’s hands after Leonard Wells Volk’s original plaster casts suggest how hand sculptures could function as kinds of portraits. Perhaps the best-known anecdote about these casts regards the discrepancy in size between Lincoln’s left and right hands. The cast of Lincoln’s right hand is markedly larger than the left, purportedly because Lincoln, already long on the campaign trail when the casts were taken (in April of 1860—just before being nominated for the presidency), had done a great deal of handshaking, which caused his dominant (right) hand to swell.17 In addition to capturing Lincoln’s hand in its visible allusion to his then-contemporary political history, Volk also captured aspects of Lincoln’s earlier, personal history. For, it appears that while in the process of casting Lincoln’s hand, the artist “commented on a scar on Lincoln’s left thumb, and Lincoln explained that it was a souvenir of his days as a rail-splitter: ‘one day, while I was sharpening a wedge on a log, the axe glanced and nearly took my thumb off.’”18 Volk’s cast of Lincoln’s right hand and Anna Hyatt Huntington’s own cast hand are alike in one important way. Both works depict hands in which long, thin, relatively cylindrical objects are held. Lincoln’s hand grasps a piece of a broom handle, a stand-in for what could be transformed into a rolled document in a later sculpture of Lincoln.19 Although the fragment of the broomstick handle may appear insignificant, its potential to signal Lincoln’s professional success (be it as a lawyer or as a politician) shows the extent to which sculptural fragments of the human form can evoke not only an individual’s physical presence, but also aspects of his or her personal life and professional persona. The scar on Lincoln’s hand calls to mind the subject’s past; the hand’s swollen state serves as evidence of Lincoln’s present; and the document for which the broomstick handle stood as a substitute indirectly alludes to Lincoln’s current (and perhaps even anticipated) political success. Like Volk’s hand of Lincoln, Anna Hyatt Huntington’s holds the sign of a profession. Throughout her career, Hyatt Huntington was photographed and painted by her contemporaries. Whereas her favorite photograph (taken from Sculpture in Stone, a film produced for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1930) shows her at work on one of her jaguar sculptures holding a sharp, pointed tool used to create detail, the artist’s own sculptural self-portrait holds a wire sculpting tool whose function is quite different. This tool is commonly used to strip layers of clay away in the preliminary stages of the modeling process. Marion Boyd Allen’s Portrait of Anna Vaughn Hyatt of 1915 depicts the artist using one such wire tool while at work on a small clay model of what would become her large-scale equestrian sculpture(s) of Joan of Arc. Unlike the pointed tool in the still photograph from Sculpture in Stone, which is used to chisel away at a piece of stone that was destined become a finished work, the tool represented in the hand cast and in the Allen painting is exclusively used in creating a clay sketch, the forum for artistic experimentation and freedom of thought. The immediacy of that thought is conveyed by the pieces of clay that remain on the wire loop of the sculpting tool. The tool thus alludes not only to the manual skills of the sculptor, but also to the mental capacities demanded by artistic invention. The techniques that produced hand sculptures are not always obvious or easy to identify. Volk’s own writings about his experiences confirm that the face mask and cast hands of Abraham Lincoln were taken from life. As is typical of plaster casting, the artist likely applied wet plaster to the already moistened parts of Lincoln’s face and hands. Once dry, the plaster would have been carefully removed from the subject’s skin.20 Scholars believe Saint-Gaudens’ bronzes were directly based on Volk’s actual life casts of Lincoln. A straight line leads therefore from Lincoln (the real sitter) to St. Gaudens’ bronze sculpture. Similarly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning agreed to Hosmer’s request to create a cast of her hand only on the condition that Hosmer take the life casts herself.21 Hosmer proudly proclaimed the real origin of the hands: “I know it is the only hand of Mrs. Browning and I think I am right in saying that it is the only hand of Mr. Browning and I know they were cast upon live hands for I took the cast myself . . . .” 22 Did Anna Hyatt Huntington cast her hands from life? We do not know. If so, the original plaster casts have either been lost or remain undocumented. Furthermore, the fact that Hyatt Huntington’s father-in-law, Collis Potter Huntington, had passed away in 1900 (long before the artist became acquainted with her husband and his family) indicates that if a plaster cast of Collis Potter Huntington’s hand had been taken from life, it was made by someone other than Anna Hyatt Huntington. In any case, Anna Hyatt Huntington’s hands remain revelations of her sense of personal and professional self. Their very existence is telling, and so is the object grasped in the artist’s hand. The models or casts for all of the hands were likely done between 1923, the year Anna Vaughn Hyatt married Archer Milton Huntington, and 1927, when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. By 1927, Anna Hyatt Huntington had made a portrait bust of Collis Potter Huntington.23 It is plausible to suggest that she worked on the portrait bust and the portrait hand of the same person at the same time. Perhaps also the momentous changes in her life right after her marriage inspired sculptures that alluded to her new personal and professional situation. Yet, unlike the Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Hyatt Huntington hands do not explicitly evoke the relationship between husband and wife, or between father and son. Each of Hyatt Huntington’s cast hands is physically separate. The hands are individual works of art in their own right. In fact, Hyatt Huntington ensured that her own cast hand would remain an independent work by placing the wire sculpting tool in her grasp. That the artist signed the bottom of the tool’s handle with her initials (AHH) serves as further evidence of her interest in conveying her professional self through her hand sculpture. The tool’s inclusion in the aluminum cast, as well as the prominent signature inscribed on it, celebrate Hyatt Huntington’s ‘artistic hand.’ This is not to say, however, that Hyatt Huntington’s assertion of her artistic prowess through the depiction of the tool was designed to suggest a priority of her professional self over her personal relationships—on the contrary, it was through sculpture that Hyatt Huntington had met her husband and with his support that she had created some of her major works (most notably, the sculpture program in the courtyard of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, which the pair discussed in the years leading up to their marriage). Rather, this observation is intended to indicate that Hyatt Huntington’s vision and projection of herself was deeply intertwined with her professional endeavors and aspirations. Hyatt Huntington’s commitment to her career may also be understood through the hands’ rendering in aluminum, a material that only became available to sculptors in the late nineteenth century.24 Defined as “a modern metal gained from bauxite, and much favoured, after bronze, for sculpture,” this material was “produced industrially in a wide range of alloys to suit an almost infinite range of applications. Often their colour and physical properties vary little, and so their interest to sculptors is limited.”25 For Hyatt Huntington, however, this material offered a range of possibilities. The artist described aluminum’s merits in a letter dated May 27, 1955, more than twenty years after she had begun experimenting with this medium: “I started to use aluminum for my animal pieces back in the early 30s, as the somber effect of bronze never seemed satisfactory. I asked the Roman Bronze works of Corona [one of the foundries to which Hyatt Huntington sent her works] to experiment with an aluminum casting for me and it proved most satisfactory, giving a life and brilliance of surface that showed fine modeling in even a poor light and I have used it ever since whenever possible.”26 Given aluminum’s relative newness, Hyatt Huntington’s enthusiasm in adopting this medium was bold. That the artist used this untraditional medium to create works of sculpture whose likeness to and probable derivation from life casts alone could have triggered accusations of artistic unoriginality further demonstrates Hyatt Huntington’s daring. Furthermore, the artist’s persistence in employing aluminum illustrates her unabashed willingness to deviate from artistic convention—risky business for a female sculptor of early twentieth-century America. Other, more practical aspects of aluminum were also important to the artist. In their discussion of Hyatt Huntington’s use of aluminum, Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz have noted that, “Huntington grew to favor aluminum for what she considered its intrinsic values: vibrant surface quality, resistance to oxidation and resultant utility for outdoor display, and the freedom it afforded her to create open, dynamic compositions that could be supported on narrow points of contact on a base.”27 That aluminum was relatively inexpensive as compared with bronze (the intrinsically valuable medium in which sculpture was traditionally cast) and, further, that it was lightweight and therefore easily transported likely also factored into the artist’s decision to make frequent use of this material in the latter part of her career.28 The ease with which aluminum sculptures could be transported from one location to another facilitated such works’ widespread exposure. Indeed, Hyatt Huntington’s retrospective exhibition, on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in November of 1936, included one hundred seventy-one sculptures, many of which were executed in aluminum. Sixty-nine of these objects “subsequently toured the country, traveling to twenty-one museums between June 1937 and February 1939.”29 Absent in this and what appears to be all other exhibitions were the aluminum casts of the hands of the artist, her husband, and her father-in-law. If not for the purpose of public exhibition, why did Anna Hyatt Huntington take pains to have no less than five of these hands cast in aluminum? Perhaps it was because she hoped to have her personal and professional personae set, not just in aluminum, but also—metaphorically—in stone. Footnotes1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (New York: Sunwise Turn, Inc., 1919), 39; quoted in Albert E. Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from Rodin to 1969 (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1970), 28. Back2 Albert E. Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from Rodin to 1969, 13 Back3 Daniel Rosenfeld, “Rodin’s Partial Figures,” in Rodin, A Magnificent Obsession, 127- 174 (London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2001), 150. Back4 In an interview with Dorothy Seckler of circa 1964, Anna Hyatt Huntington commented that, “Of course I was always an admirer of Rodin.” Oral history interview with Anna Hyatt-Huntington, circa 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Back5 Bernard Barryte and Roberta K. Tarbell, ed., Rodin and America, Influence and Adaptation, 1876-1936 (Milan: Silvana Editoriale; Stanford: Cantor Arts Center, 2011), 260-262. Back6 Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; New Haven: London: Yale University Press, 1997), 98. Back8 Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 99. 9 Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, Volume II, Catalogue of Works (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991), 216 10 William H. Gerdts, American Neo-Classic Sculpture, the Marble Resurrection (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1973), not paginated. Back11 Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, 216-219. Back13 Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, 218. Back14 Loretta Dimmick, “Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” in Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 133. Back15 Margaret Wendell LaBarre, ‘Harriet Hosmer: Her Era and Art,’ Thesis and Index Filmed by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Lent by the Watertown Free Public Library, Watertown, Massachusetts, Dec 4, 1975, 150. Back16 Cornelia Carr, ed. Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1912), 323, quoted in Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 133. Back17 Tolles, ed. American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 124. Back18 Fine Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana. New York, Friday, December 13, 2002. Auction: 1334 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021. Friday December 13, 2002 at 10:15PM, 220. Back20 Jack C. Rich, The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1988), 107-109. Back21 Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 132. Back22Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, Letter to Amelia Dyckman Van Doren Ripley, September 27, 1895, Wellesley College Library, quoted in Nineteenth Century American Women Neoclassical Sculptors, Vassar College Art Gallery, April 4 through April 30, 1972 (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Merchants Press, 1972), Catalogue number 2a (not paginated). Back23 The bust of Collis Potter Huntington by Anna Hyatt Huntington is currently on view at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. Back24 Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven: London: Yale University Press, 1993), 295. Back25 John Mills, Encyclopedia of Sculpture Techniques (London: Batsford, 2001), 13. Back26 Anna Hyatt Huntington, Letter to Delpha Heyward, May 27, 1955, Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University, quoted in Robin R. Salmon, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, Volume II (Brookgreen: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1993), 42. Back27 Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture, Studio Works, 1893-1939 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 74. Back28 A receipt from Gargani & Sons, Inc. dated October 18, 1935 indicates that the total cost for making two aluminum casts of the artist’s hand, two aluminum casts of her husband’s hand, and one aluminum cast of Collis Potter Huntington’s hand was $180.00, making each cast $30.00, a modest sum as compared with the cost of bronze casting. Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers, Box 33, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University. Back29 Conner and Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture, Studio Works, 1893 1939, 76. Back |