The most beautiful art museum I’ve ever visited is actually a garden called Brookgreen, founded on former plantation land in the marshy low country just north of Charleston, South Carolina. The place is filled with the country’s largest collection of American figurative sculptures, cast in bronze or chiseled from stone, running and dancing and peeking out from between the ponderous trunks of the live oaks that line the garden paths. It’s a remarkable place, created by a remarkable couple: he was Archer Milton Huntington, a wealthy scholar and philanthropist. She was Anna Hyatt Huntington, the sculptor whose equestrian Joan of Arc marks the 93rd Street entrance to Riverside Park on New York’s Upper West Side.
The Huntingtons originally envisioned Brookgreen Gardens as a home for Anna’s work, and many of her sculptures can still be found there. But what they ended up creating was something far grander and more enduring: nearly 10,000 acres, more than 2,000 sculptures, a wildlife preserve, and of course, the garden. The best time to visit is during the holidays, when they drape the oaks in glittering strands of light, line the paths with golden luminaria, and fill all the fountains and reflecting pools with votive candles that surround the sculptures like floating stars.
I have long been fascinated by Anna, who was already a successful working artist when she met and married Archer in 1923, three years shy of her fiftieth birthday, a thing I cannot think about without also thinking of that line from Sleepless in Seattle, about how it’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after the age of 40. (No, this isn’t true. But as the movie says, it feels true—and in the 1920s, I bet it felt even truer.) But I thought of her again last month, amid the discourse surrounding J.D. Vance’s now-infamous comments deriding the “childless sociopaths” on the left “who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
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