Born into a distinguished New England family, Daniel Huntington studied at Yale College for a year and transferred to Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, in 1832. There he met the itinerant painter Charles Loring Elliott, who encouraged his artistic aspirations. Huntington left Hamilton in 1836 to study under Samuel F. B. Morse-then president of the National Academy-who had recently set up an art department at New York University. He soon moved on to the studio of Henry Inman for instruction. He also developed skill in portrait painting by working as an assistant to Frederick R. Spencer. By 1838 Huntington had his own first pupil, Henry Peters Gray.
Huntington's academic training and profound religious convictions together inspired an ambition to paint historical, particularly religious, subjects. During his first trip to Italy in 1839-40, he painted several works on Christian themes. His reputation was established when he exhibited Mercy's Dream (1841, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), derived from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in the Academy's annual exhibition of 1841. In the late 1840s Huntington widened his scope to include English history. His Queen Mary Signs the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey (unlocated) was engraved for distribution by the American Art-Union, New York, in 1848. Huntington continued to produce religious works throughout his seventy-year career as well as genre and literary paintings and many landscapes.
In 1850 a major solo exhibition of his work demonstrated Huntington's popularity with fellow artists and the public alike. Around this time the painter turned increasingly to portraiture, for which he tapped an impressive network of familial, collegiate, social, and artistic connections. In all, he painted some one thousand portraits, including many distinguished sitters. In 1861 he combined history painting and portraiture in The Republican Court (a.k.a. Mrs. Washington's Reception) (Brooklyn Museum, New York); the work was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, in 1867 and engraved by A. H. Ritchie the same year. Huntington crowned his prolific career in portraiture with The American Projectors of the Atlantic Cable (1894, New York Chamber of Commerce), which included likenesses of Cyrus W. Field, Samuel F. B. Morse, himself, and others.
Huntington first showed in an Academy annual in 1836 and was liberally represented in these exhibitions every year thereafter through 1901, with a single work apiece included in 1903 and in 1905. With his engaging personality and talent for institutional affairs, Huntington was an active, and increasingly powerful, presence at the Academy from his election as Academician in 1840. The following year he served on the Council, and he did so again for the 1847-48, 1851-52, 1860-61, and 1861-62 terms. In the spring of 1862 he was elected president of the Academy, a post to which he was reelected annually until 1870, when the governance of the institution passed to different elements in the membership ranks. However, in 1875 Huntington was returned to the Council and in 1876 to the presidency, an office in which he remained this time until 1891. His combined tenures as president make him the longest-standing holder of that office in the Academy's history, exceeding even Samuel F. B. Morse.
Huntington was a founding member of the Century Association in 1847 and served as its president from 1879 to 1895, a period nearly concurrent with his second extended tenure as Academy president. He was a vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from its founding in 1870 until 1903; and he served as a trustee of the Lenox Library (later the New York Public Library). He thus exercised exceptional influence in the New York cultural establishment of his day. In this role, as well as in his art, Huntington was a force for conservative resistance to the changes sweeping American art in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The artist was duly eulogized in the president's address given at the Academy's annual meeting of May 9, 1906:
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The death of Daniel Huntington . . . has closed the career of an Artist who achieved a high rank, in various branches, with a degree of reputation and success unmatched in his generation. . . . His death, moreover, has broken a living link that bound us, in a measure, not alone with the very beginnings of the Academy but with the Art and Artists of a time when our nation was in its infancy. . . . Of unblemished character, dignified yet courteous in manner and address, with social talents of high order, he represented not alone the Academy but the profession with distinguished success.
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WG
