Permanent Collection Highlight: Echo Lying Down - Cheekwood
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Permanent Collection Highlight: Echo Lying Down

Publish Date: 2/15/2021

Echo Lying Down, 1935

Aluminum

Anna Hyatt Huntington (American, 1876-1973)

This spring, the Stallworth and Thompson Galleries will be installed to display Cheekwood’s collection of American paintings, sculpture and decorative arts from the Centennial through the Second World War. Cheekwood’s permanent collection gallery will display many favorite works from the museum collection that best illuminate the creative artistic talents that were prominent during Cheekwood’s designated collecting era of American Art from 1875-1940. The permanent collection gallery will contain paintings, sculpture and decorative arts will open February 20, 2021.

A highlight of the new permanent collection gallery installation is Anna Hyatt Huntington’s (American, 1876-1973) Echo Lying Down, 1935. Last seen on view at Cheekwood in 1964, the aluminum sculpture of Huntington’s elegant greyhound named Echo is perched on a piece of green marble. Huntington among some of New York City’s most prominent sculptors. At a time when very few women were successful artists, she had a thriving career. Hyatt Huntington exhibited often, traveled widely, received critical acclaim at home and abroad, and won awards and commissions. Huntington was born in Cambridge Massachusetts to the daughter of a professor of paleontology and zoology at Harvard University. This resulted in her early interest in animals and animal anatomy. She married Archer Milton Huntington, son of railroad magnate and industrialist Collis P. Huntington. Together, the Huntingtons founded Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.

Huntington is best known for her large-scale sculptures, but also created smaller pieces, often of domestic animals. These were given a personal, and often whimsical, quality. Huntington was known for her portrayal of the everyday gestures of animals, as seen in Echo Lying Down. In the sculpture, Echo looks as if it has just heard its name called and looking back at its owner, Huntington and her husband. Huntington came out of the generation of female sculptors at the end of the nineteenth century and we are thrilled to display the work again. While Huldah’s dogs Hiro and Aristotle are memorialized in the Bracken Foundation Children’s Garden, Echo will take over the role of guard dog, from inside the museum.

Echo-Lying-Down
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