Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Private Collection, Massachusetts, c.1950 until present

William Hunt Diederich’s aesthetic fascination with animals began in his Hungarian childhood and endured throughout his career. By the age of five, Diederich was cutting out paper silhouettes of the horses, stags, and exotic hounds found on his family’s estate. The graceful lines, fluid movements and inherent nobility of these animals served as Diederich’s greatest inspiration, and resulted in the exquisite wrought iron works for which he is best known.

At the age of sixteen, after studying for a time in Switzerland, Diederich moved to Boston to live with his maternal grandfather, the artist William Morris Hunt. He was enrolled at the venerable Milton Academy; but Diederich’s restless, independent nature clashed with the school’s traditional academic environment. Diederich dropped out and headed west. He assumed the life of a cowboy, working on ranches in Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Diederich finally settled in Paris and began studying with the acclaimed animalier sculptor Emmanuel Frèmiet. In 1913, his work was exhibited at both the Salon d’Automne in Paris and the historic Armory Show in New York. Shortly thereafter, Diederich returned to the United States, this time to New York. He continued to create his animal sculpture, while also producing decorative furnishings in wrought iron.

These lively two-dimensional objects evolved from Diederich’s silhouette cutouts, a pastime he began as a child and described in the catalogue for his first New York sculpture exhibition of 1920: “As a child of five, I embarked upon my artistic career by cutting out silhouettes of animals with a pair of broken pointed scissors, for I love animals first, last and always.”¹

Combining the decorative with the practical, Diederich created two and three-dimensional silhouettes in the form of his wrought-iron pieces. According to his daughter, Diana Blake, her father’s “work in cast iron (sic) was a very important part of his life, perhaps the most important.”² No doubt, Diederich enjoyed the contrast between the dark and inflexible heaviness of iron with the lively, energetic and seemingly weightless end product that he skillfully produced.

While Diederich’s familiarity with earlier European ironwork techniques is evident in Mountain Goats, his articulation is done in a firmly modern voice. Diederich transforms the dark, heavy material of wrought iron into a whimsically lyrical lamp, radiant with energy. Configured as if they were dancers, the mountain goats stand on toe, their bodies attenuated and their necks arched. Each finely detailed, silhouetted goat supports a candleholder as if wearing a crown of light. The candelabrum is unified by Diederich’s masterful execution of the curvilinear line throughout, and he extends the graceful curve to soften the solid base by resting it on three scrolled-shaped feet.