Victoria Ebbels Hutson

American, 1900–1971

Birth placeHasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, United States

Death placeChatham, New Jersey, United States

BiographyVictoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley, a painter, muralist and printmaker better known for her work in the latter medium, was born in 1900 in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, but lived in New York City from infancy until 1921. She studied in New York City at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, and at the Art Students League. Because she was still in grammar, then high school, Huntley, from the age of twelve through eighteen, attended classes at the League on Saturdays. In 1918, she attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Art on a scholarship. She entered the Art Student League's regular schedule of classes in 1919.

There she worked with realist painters George Bridgman, George Luks and John Sloan, and abstractionist Max Weber. When her father died at the end of her second year at the League, she entered Teachers College, then moved to Denton, Texas, where she was an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the College of Industrial Arts from 1921 - 1923. She then returned to the League for study with realist painter Kenneth Hayes Miller and mural painter, William C. Palmer. She responded mainly to Weber's teaching, and appreciated Luks' belief that she had the potential to be a mural painter.

She married William K. Hutson in 1925. In 1934, she would marry Ralph Huntley. She assumed his name as hers professionally. They moved to West Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1936. Her life and art would take her to New York, Texas, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey.

Huntley's early work explored precision industrial forms, followed later by still-lifes, landscapes, rural genre scenes, and birds and flowers. In 1930, a series of lithographs depicting industrial and factory sites, entitled "Steam and Steel", earned her national attention. She created a series of lithographs in the 1940s based on the plants and birds of the Florida Everglades. She painted murals in post offices in Greenwich, Connecticut and Springfield, New York.

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