to View - American Art Collector

The
of the
HORSE
SPECIAL FEATURE 2015
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A
nna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) was
the daughter of a paleontologist and
a landscape painter. As a girl she learned
animal anatomy on her parents' and her
brother’s farms, drawing and making
small models in clay. There’s a story that
her parents found her one day lying down
in the field in front of a horse, studying the
way his muscles moved when he chewed
the grass.
She exhibited a sculpture of Joan of
Arc in the Paris Salon of 1910 and was
awarded an honorable mention. She
recalled, “But, curiously enough, they
said that what I’d been doing, because
I worked entirely by myself and did all
the building up of the life-size horse and
everything, they said it was impossible
for a woman to do it. Therefore they
couldn’t give me a real medal because
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By John O’Hern
they could not believe I had done it all
myself.” (Oral history interview with
Anna Hyatt-Huntington, circa 1964,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.)
Huntington’s monumental sculptures
of horses and riders are in collections
around the world. She did some of the first
sculptures to be cast in aluminum. The
Torch Bearers, depicting the passing on of
knowledge from one generation to the next,
is a dramatic example of her work.
She and her husband Archer Milton
Huntington (1870-1955) gave their New
York townhouse to become the home
of the National Academy of Design. He
commissioned Joaquín Sorolla (18631923) to create the spectacular murals at
the Hispanic Society of America in New
York. Together, he and Anna established
Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, the
country’s first sculpture garden and now a
National Historic Landmark.
Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) is best
known for her monumental painting
The Horse Fair, 1852–1855, now in
the collection of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Bonheur also painted
more intimate portraits of prize horses.
Although, at the time, it was thought that
women should paint quietly at home,
Bonheur made a living from her art and
was asked by Queen Victoria for a private
viewing of The Horse Fair. Empress
Eugénie visited her at her studio in the
forest of Fontainbleau and awarded the
artist the Grand Cross of the Legion of
Honor. Napoleon had established the
award, and Bonheur was the first woman
to receive it.
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Huntington was training to be a
concert violinist before she turned to
sculpture. Marguerite Kirmse (18851954) trained as a harpist at the Royal
Academy of Music in London. She
visited the U.S. with some friends
and decided to remain but couldn’t
establish a musical career here. She had
always been interested in animals and
art and began making drawings and
prints of dogs.
Painted early in her career, The
Morning Drive, 1913, depicts a genteel
young lady in white out in her cart
giving her horse its morning workout.
The novelist Jane Smiley wrote,
“I learned why ‘out riding alone’
is an oxymoron: An equestrian is
never alone, is always sensing the
other being, the mysterious but also
understandable living being that is
the horse.”
These women artists developed an
affinity for and an understanding of
horses that enriches our own.
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Anna Hyatt Huntington
(1876-1973), The Torch
Bearers, modeled 1953,
cast 1956-57, cast
aluminum, 16’ high.
Ciudad Universitaria
de Madrid, Spain.
Photograph by Carlos
Delgado; CC-BY-SA.
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Rosa Bonheur (18221899), Horses Grazing,
oil on canvas, 8½ x 13".
Courtesy Rehs Galleries,
Inc., New York, New York.
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Marguerite Kirmse
(1885-1954), The
Morning Drive, 1913,
oil on canvas, 20 x 28".
Courtesy Red Fox Fine
Art, Middleburg, Virginia.
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Anna Hyatt Huntington
(1876-1973) working
on her sculpture Jose
Marti. Courtesy National
Archives and Records
Administration.
S. C. VERSILLEE
(216) 586-4494
[email protected]
www.scversillee.com
Price Range:
$1,500 to $20,000
S. C. Versillee is an Ohio-born
contemporary realist painter
whose representational works
straddle the boundary between
magical and romantic realism.
People and animals are her
favorite subjects, as she
finds endless fascination in
the organic architecture of
living figures. Storytelling,
symbolism and myth play
important roles in her largescale paintings, and her goal
Horse Over Crow, oil, 35 x 48"
as an artist is not to doggedly
render realistic depictions
of subjects, but to capture
their essence through the
careful use of tone, texture,
composition and light.
Despite being an “urban
child,” horses have always
figured strongly in the artist’s
work, posing as metaphors
of freedom, grace and power.
A graduate of Kent State
University and the Cleveland
Institute of Art, Versillee
has corporate and private
collectors of her works
throughout the United States
and abroad.
field of color transparency
retouching. But 20 years later,
in the late ’90s, when digital
media began to overwhelm
his industry, he decided to
leave that business and take
up oil painting. He has been
creating portraits, nudes,
exotic animals, floral and still
lifes in a photorealistic style
for just 12 years.
A distinctive hallmark of his
personal style is his ability to
understand and execute a high
degree of contrast between
light and dark—a rare skill
refined through decades of
intense retouching work then
translated into the oil paintings
he creates today.
CEES PENNING
(305) 467-0065
www.ceespenningfineart.com
Price Range:
$3,800 to $32,000
Born in Rotterdam, Holland,
Cees Penning is a self-taught
photorealist painter with deft
skills honed over a career
that has spanned almost five
decades and three countries.
Penning began drawing
and painting when he was
in kindergarten. Initially, his
paintings were watercolors. But,
always fascinated by realism,
he was first attracted to a career
in graphic design. Penning
graduated from the Graphic
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www.AmericanAr tCollector.com
A Close Finish, oil on panel, 38 x 68"
Academy in Amsterdam in
the 1960s, and he worked as a
color transparency retoucher
in Holland and Germany
until 1974 when he moved to
New York.
Once in the United States,
Pe n n i n g e s t ab l i she d a
successful enterprise in the
very precise and demanding
STEPHANIE JEANNE HARDY
(425) 890-9211 | www.stephaniejeanne.com
Price Range: $200 to $3,000
“Painting is my avocation and my vocation,”
says Stephanie Jeanne Hardy. “For me, as I have
breathed life into my calling and my career,
painting has become at once the integral ‘self’
and the extension of that ‘self.’”
Hardy loves the challenge of bringing
energy to the canvas through color, texture
and lines. Her work has evolved from traditional
interpretations of people and nature to her
current abstract studies of equestrian subjects.
She strives to embrace changing perspectives
in her creative process, as it moves her forward
as an artist and creates a contemporary impact
on her canvas. She looks to inspire dialogue
between her paintings and her audience.
Gypsy, acrylic on stretched canvas, 48 x 48"
AR T O F THE H O R S E
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