William Morris Hunt

As a teacher, writer on art, and Boston's most prominent artist in the 1860s and 1870s, William Morris Hunt served as an essential link between American painters and collectors and important artistic developments in France in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, to a prominent New England family, Hunt received drawing lessons along with his four siblings; a younger brother, Richard Morris Hunt, later became a prominent architect. In 1843, Hunt traveled to Europe with his mother. Intending to become a sculptor, he studied with American sculptor Henry Kirke Brown (1814–86) in Rome, before enrolling in the art academy in Düsseldorf, Germany. In Paris, Hunt decided to become a painter after seeing a work by influential French painter Thomas Couture (1815–79), with whom he studied for five years. Hunt abandoned the allegorical and religious subjects sanctioned in academic practice after meeting French realist painter Jean-François Millet (1814–75), leader of the Barbizon school (named for the French village near which they painted). These artists' loose, more expressive brushwork and particularly Millet's realist scenes of rural life profoundly influenced Hunt, who began to paint large-scale generic figures in contemplative poses.

Hunt returned to the United States in 1855 and lived in Newport, Rhode Island, before establishing himself in Boston. There, he became the city's leading society portrait painter and was active as a teacher. Gradually, he moved away from his early-career genre scenes, or scenes of everyday life, and began to create landscapes both in oil on canvas and in charcoal sketches. Inspired by the Barbizon artists, Hunt painted nature in intimate settings and with spontaneous treatment and subjective mood rather than the fidelity to detail, bright color, and photographic realism sought by most of his American contemporaries. As an influential figure on the American art scene, he helped spread awareness of this more modern approach, then being pioneered in France. Hunt made two more visits abroad, in 1866 and in 1867–68, during which he strengthened his ties with contemporary European artists. A fire that swept Boston in 1872 destroyed much of the contents of Hunt's studio.

Along with John La Farge, Hunt inaugurated an era of important public mural painting in America. Near the end of his life, he completed a pair of murals for the Assembly Chamber of the New York State Capitol in Albany that were revolutionary not only in their freedom of brushwork and unity of composition but in their presentation of American themes within the traditional, classically inspired allegorical language of grand-scale mural decoration. Hunt's murals were well received, but a series of recent personal tragedies along with poor sales of his easel paintings combined to leave him despondent. The drowning death of the fifty-five-year-old artist was suspected as a suicide. Hunt was widely mourned by his contemporaries, and has come to be recognized by students of American art as a pivotal figure in its development.