Hunt Diederich

Hunt Diederich was (from his mother’s side) the grandson of the American painter William Morris Hunt and the grandnephew of the American architect Richard Morris Hunt. His father was a Prussian cavalry officer who bred horses in Hungary. After his father’s early death, Hunt was educated partly in Switzerland around Lake Geneva and went to his maternal grandfather in Boston in 1900. There he began to study art but gave it up temporarily to work as a cowboy in the western United States.

In 1906 Diederich resumed his studies in Philadelphia, later also studying in Roma and Paris. He traveled to Spain and North Africa, especially Morocco, but returned to New York when World War I broke out. In the 1920s he also lived and worked in Germany. From 1941 he settled again in New York. He was mostly known for bronzes of animals or people with animals for his silhouette cuts. His brother-in-law was the important German paper cutting and silhouette artist Ernst Moritz Engert. Hunt Diederich’s reputation suffered, however, due to his pro-German attitude and Antisemitism and he was forgotten for a long time. After World War II, he exhibited in Europe as well as in America.

In 1928 and 1932 he submitted works both in painting and sculpturing to the Olympic Art Exhibition. The identity of the work Polo Players, which was submitted in 1928, is uncertain. It could well be one of the iron weather vanes with polo motifs, which he is said to have been produced around 1926. His bronze sculpture Polo was not created until 1932 and was awarded “Honorable Mention” in the same year. It is 41 x 69 x 25 cm in size. The Race horse is probably one of his bronze figures of jockeys on horses produced in the late 1920s. One of his most famous works is Diana and Hound from 1925. The bronze version from 1930 is about 68 cm high.

In the 1932 art catalog, Diederich’s paper silhouettes are listed separately under “Silhouettes” and not attributed to a specific section. Some of these works can be identified, while some series – such as the 1925 one on bullfighting – comprised more than the number of works exhibited. Four of his boxers, which he laid on silver paper, are known, in formats of 18 x 28 cm and 22 x 30 cm, respectively. Apparently only three were exhibited, however, as indicated by the numbering in the catalog. The Polo player adorned the cover of the catalog, and almost certainly the Mounted Archer and the Fighting Bucks were among the works that were exhibited. There is more than one version, however, of the Matador, the Picador and the Bull Fight. As far as the formats are known, they can be assigned to two groups: smaller ones of an average 17 x 22 cm and larger ones of 23 x 32 cm. Unlike the boxers, these silhouettes were all underlaid with white paper.