Art: Rabbit Rail

Socialite Mrs. Forbes Hawkes of Sands Point, L. I., who gives amusing parties, dabbles in painting and adores rabbits, has on her estate a guest house of concrete and composition board known as The Hutch. Paintings, prints, statues and friezes of rabbits fill the building. On the terrace last week there was a new balcony railing of wrought iron. It showed a frieze of galloping rabbits and it was news to the entire U. S. art world, for the installation of the rabbit rail meant that one of the best sculptors and ablest iron workers in the U. S. was back on his feet after eight years in hospitals in Germany, France and the U. S.

Born in Hungary 52 years ago, Erne Hunt Diederich was the son of a rich and swank Hungarian horse breeder. His mother was the daughter of famed Bostonian Artist William Morris Hunt. A distant cousin of Diederich is onetime U. S. Ambassador to Japan William Cameron Forbes. Convinced at that time that he was the last of the Hunts, Erno Diederich began to be called Hunt Diederich when he was 10 years old.

All his life Hunt Diederich has shared his father’s passion for horses. Horse swapping expeditions in his early child hood carried him from one European country to another, gave him much variegated schooling.

In the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Hunt Diederich started first to be a painter, put in several years producing sentimental canvases in the Barbizon manner. Hunt Diederich achieved his first popular success with a 15-ft. bronze of two gamboling greyhounds. It won a mention at the Paris Autumn Salon, much notice in the press, was promptly bought by Robert de Rothschild.

Two other copies of the Greyhounds caused Sculptor Diederich a little embarrassment. One was sold to a Turk who was furious to discover that the bronze was hollow. The other remained in Diederich’s studio in New York for years. One evening in 1915 Sculptor Diederich gave a farewell party before moving to another studio. About the third round of drinks the problem of the greyhounds and what to do with them seemed very acute. Somebody suddenly remembered that there was in Central Park a vacant pedestal. With great sweating and grunting the entire party loaded the greyhounds into a taxi and presented them informally to the city. Police for some reason found this highly irregular, forced Sculptor Diederich to move his greyhounds to the arsenal.

From the greyhound incident Hunt Diederich’s reputation blossomed quickly. Followed a series of commissions for animal sculpture of all sorts from fire screens to weather vanes. His wrought-iron silhouets of horses and riders became world-known. At the height of his popularity eight years ago Hunt Diederich fell off a scaffolding in Germany, smashed his right leg. It became infected. Doctors wished to amputate but Sculptor Diederich stubbornly refused to let them, traveled in agony from one hospital to another. Few months ago the first real progress came with the application of sterile maggots to the open wound.

“The maggots were a nuisance at first,” says Sculptor Diederich last week. “They got all over the bedclothes and all over my trousers, until I found a way to keep them where they belonged.”

Crawling with maggots and bursting with new projects, last week Hunt Diederich was able to walk and work again, was busy constructing a trailer for a trip to Mexico, planning to take up painting after 25 years.