Description: Bronze sculpture of two fawns playing with each other. Fawn on right stands on its hind legs, arches head sideways to look at other fawn. Fawn on left has left front leg extended slightly and is looking up toward other fawn
Label Text: Despite being one of the most successful American artists of the first half of the 20th century, Anna Hyatt Huntington is little known today. Huntington spent her childhood around her father, a professor of paleontology at Harvard, and he inspired in her a love for animals that became evident in her sculptures. Fawns Playing at first seems to depict two fawns in a single, frozen moment. However, the piece evolves and morphs depending where the viewer stands. Each angle shows something new, creating a dynamic dance between the two animals. Building on ideas from the famous 19th-century French animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Fawns Playing depicts a dramatic struggle, and the figures are represented with attention to anatomical accuracy.
-Charles Holt (Class of 2018), University of Massachussetts Amherst A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives (July 29, 2017 - May 27, 2018)
Tags: animals; representation; deer; sculpture; women artists Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1937.2.I%28b%29.OI |