Joan of Arc

“Joan of Arc…embodied the pure enthusiasm which makes for all that is heroic and poetic,” wrote President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 upon the unveiling of Anna Hyatt Huntington’s monumental equestrian statue of the young heroine of the Hundred Years’ War. The statue, here in a later, small-scale reproduction, had won a New York City contest for a monument to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joan, a beloved French national symbol for her defense of France against English domination and, from the mid-nineteenth century on, an object of fascination in America. 

Primarily a sculptor of animals, Huntington rendered Joan’s spirited mount in vivid anatomical detail, endowing it with flared nostrils and a cheek crossed by delicate veins. To ensure the historical accuracy of her depiction, she studied accounts of Joan’s life and consulted with a curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of arms and armor, ultimately modeling Joan’s armor from an authentic fifteenth-century suit. 

In 1927, the gift of Huntington’s sculpture Diana of the Chase to The University of Texas at Austin prompted her husband, Archer Huntington, to make the financial donation which founded the Archer M. Huntington Gallery, later renamed the Blanton Museum of Art.