Beatrice Huntington was born in 1889 in St. Andrews to Dr William Huntington, surgeon, and Charlotte Huntington, née Bowles, daughter of Joseph Bowles of Quebec City. She was educated in St Andrews before attending art schools in Paris and Munich between 1906-1911. She began exhibiting in 1916 and became an active member of the Dundee Art Society and the Society of Scottish Artists. Influenced by Modernist art styles, she experimented with Cubism in her portraits, including 'A Muleteer from Andalucia' (1923) and 'The Cellist' (c.1924). In 1924 she studied music with the cellist Julius Klengel in Leipzig. In 1925 she married the painter William 'Spanish' MacDonald, with whom she shared an interest in continental European travel and culture. MacDonald was trained in Paris, where he also worked as an engraver and etcher, and exhibited widely in the Royal Scottish Academy and Scottish Society of Artists, becoming best known as a landscape painter. The couple may have met in Dundee, where MacDonald was based as an art tutor following the First World War. Huntington and MacDonald travelled extensively during the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Canada, as well as spending time in Kirkcudbright and Cassis, France with fellow artists including F C B Cadell, Samuel Peploe, E A Taylor and Jessie M King. In 1928 the couple settled at 116 Hanover Street, Edinburgh. During the 1960s and 1970s, the residence became a celebrated 'salon' for artists and art students in Edinburgh. The couple had one son, Julius MacDonald (1929-1978). Huntington bequeathed her art collection and archive to William Syson, who lent her work widely to exhibitions and established the Beatrice Huntington Award for Cellists at the William Syson Foundation in her memory.

The archive is comprised of professional and personal correspondence of Beatrice Huntington and William MacDonald; Huntington's drawings and sketchbook; press cuttings and personal ephemera relating to the couple and their family and friends; photographs; papers of Huntington's mother and father; and papers relating to William Syson's custodianship of Huntington’s collections and archive between her death and its transfer to the National Library of Scotland. Although little private correspondence between Huntington and MacDonald survives in the collection, their artistic partnership is documented through photographs and the printed books and press cuttings they collected. Also included in the archive are two portfolios of drawings of Violet Dreschfeld, sculptor and Huntington's life-long friend.