DANIEL HUNTINGTON

Portrait, allegorical, historical, and landscape painter, Daniel P. Huntington was born in New York City in 1816. Huntington was of distinguished American ancestry, being a descendant of Elder William Brewster and John Alden of the Mayflower. He entered Yale University at the age of sixteen, but transferred to Hamilton College in Utica, New York, from which he graduated in 1836. At Hamilton he met portrait painter Charles Loring Elliot, who encouraged him to study painting. Huntington studied in 1835 in New York City with Samuel F. B. Morse and Henry Inman, a founder of the National Academy of Design. In 1936-37 Huntington made a painting trip along the upper Hudson River. He became an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1839, and an Academician in 1840, and was twice elected president, in 1862-70 and 1877-91. In 1839, he traveled to Europe to study in Paris, Florence and Rome, where he was especially influenced by the work of Titian. His work at this time reflected his desire to bring allegorical, historical, and religious themes to American painting. A work entitled Mercy’s Dream, exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1841, depicts a scene from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This work was extremely popular with the American public, and numerous prints of it were sold. Huntington returned to Europe in 1843-45. He joined the Century Association in 1847 and was its president from 1879 to 1895. After 1850, Huntington mainly concentrated on painting portraits; 1,000 of his 1,200 known works are portraits. Among his subjects are Presidents Lincoln, Van Buren, Hayes, and Arthur; Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin; Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan; the Earl of Carlisle; and American poet William Cullen Bryant. Huntington also painted a seven-by-nine-foot group portrait of the promoters of the Atlantic Cable, in which he includes himself, and which he presented to the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York in 1895. Huntington made several more trips to Europe in the 1850s and in 1882, sketching in Italy, England, and Spain. He also enjoyed painting in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, especially Mt. Chocorua. He was one of a group of artists, including his friend Edwin Graves Champney, who gathered every summer in North Conway to paint and exchange ideas. He shared a studio at Jackson, New Hampshire maintained by Samuel Colman, with, among others, George Loring Brown, Frank Henry Shapleigh, Asher Brown Durand, and Aaron Draper Shattuck. Huntington exhibited widely throughout his long career, in the United States and in Paris. He was first vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and held that position for thirty-three years. He died in New York in 1906 at the age of ninety.