Framed appropriately against the classical architecture of the Chrysler Museum of Art, the heroic Torch Bearers symbolizes the endurance of Enlightenment ideals and the effort required for their preservation. One of Anna Hyatt Huntington's most ambitious multi–figure works, The Torch Bearers's bravura, idealism, and towering scale are characteristic of her major public sculptures. Over almost seven decades of active production, Huntington's animal groups and equestrian monuments increasingly ran counter to developments in twentieth–century American art, but her remarkable early success and later marriage to a wealthy philanthropist and museum benefactor guaranteed her independence. Anna Vaughn Hyatt, the daughter of a Harvard paleontologist, held her first one–artist show in 1901, exhibiting fifty animal sculptures at the Boston Art Club. Two years later she moved to New York, where she studied with classically trained sculptors Hermon Atkins MacNeil, George Gray Barnard, and Gutzon Borglum; in 1904 she won a medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. For the rest of her life, her sculpture–naturalistic animals and human figures, often in a classical context–was consistent with the aesthetics of the American Renaissance. By the early 1920s Hyatt had won awards and prestigious commissions on both sides of the Atlantic and was one of the highest–paid women in the United States. In 1923 she married the poet and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington; the results of their partnership are still visible on America's cultural landscape. One of their most impressive collaborations is the cultural center at Audubon Terrace in upper Manhattan, a complex of museums that Archer developed from 1908 to the 1930s. There, Anna's monuments to El Cid, Don Quixote, and other Spanish heroes (as well as several of her animal groups) are framed by the impeccable Beaux–Arts classicism of architects Stanford White and Cass Gilbert.

The first cast of The Torch Bearers was an April 1955 gift to the University of Madrid; Archer Huntington wrote a poem by the same title that was inscribed on its base. That was the couple's final collaboration, as he died in December.

One year later, Anna offered another cast, then partially complete, to the city of Norfolk, to be installed in the plaza facing the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences (now the Chrysler Museum of Art).

Four other versions are in museum and university collections in the United States and Cuba. In her letter offering The Torch Bearers to Norfolk, Anna Hyatt Huntington cited her husband's long affiliation with Hampton Roads. Archer's father, Collis P. Huntington, founded the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company; a few miles away, Archer established the Mariners' Museum in 1930. In the large park surrounding the Mariners' Museum are more of Anna's sculptures, including pairs of lions framing a dramatic view of the James River and another idealistic equestrian work, Conquering the Wild, ca. 1927.