William Morris Hunt

William Morris Hunt (March 31, 1824September 8, 1879) was an American painter. Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a similar group on his return to America. He became Boston's leading portrait and landscape painter, also working as a lithographer and sculptor. In 1871 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Many of his works were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Another disaster was the deterioration of the stone panels in the State Capitol at Albany, New York, on which a number of his murals had been painted. This is believed to have led to his depression and presumed suicide. Life and career William Morris Hunt was born into prominence. The family of Hunt's father Jonathan Hunt, were among Vermont's founders and largest landowners; his mother's a family of wealth and prominence in Connecticut. Hunt attended Harvard College but withdrew in his junior year. Having been denied the opportunity to paint and draw by an overbearing father, Jane Leavitt Hunt resolved that her children would be given the chance to study the arts in the best academies—even if it meant moving to Europe to attend them. Following the death of his Congressman father from cholera in 1832 at the age of 44, Hunt's mother Jane took him and his brothers to Switzerland, the South of France and to Rome, where Hunt studied with Thomas Couture in Paris, coming under the influence of Jean-François Millet after being greatly inspired by Millet's The Sower at the 1851 Paris Salon. The Hunt family remained in Europe for a dozen years. During part of that time, William Morris Hunt and his brother Richard Morris Hunt shared an apartment at 1 rue Jacob, close by the École des Beaux-Arts, where William studied painting under Couture. "From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work," writes historian David McCullough. "'Mr. William Hunt is our most promising artist here,' reported Thomas Appleton to his father." Hunt then spent the next two years under the tutelage of Millet in Barbizon before his return to the states.