WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT
1824-1879
CountryBoston, Massachusetts, USA
BiographyEntered 2/28/06 by Lisa Horne, Graduate Student in Art History & Curatorial Studies, Museum Intern, Winter 2006.Born at Brattleboro, Vermont, on March 31, 1824, Hunt entered Harvard College in 1840. He left Harvard, however, during his junior year, and because of his delicate health, his widowed mother decided to take him and her four other children to the south of France. After some travel, the family settled at Rome, where Hunt began to draw in the studio of the American sculptor Henry Kirke Brown. Shortly afterward, he went to Dusseldorf, then a great center for the study of art. There, he befriended Karl Friedrick Lessing and Emanuel Leutze. But finding the training too rigid, he entered Couture's studio at Paris in 1846. He continued to work with Couture until 1852, when he moved to Barbizon after meeting Millet, with whom he enjoyed a close association until his return to America in 1855. Hunt married and lived for about a year after his return at Brattleboro, then moved to Newport, where he painted and taught until finally settling permanently at Boston in 1862. He made a final trip abroad in 1867; other travels took him to the Azores in 1857 and to Mexico in 1875. His TALKS ON ART, compiled by Helen M. Knowlton, one of his many women-pupils, was first published in 1875. After completing two large murals for the new State Capitol at Albany, New York, late in 1878, he was drowned on the Isle of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast, on September 8, 1879. A large memorial exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from November 11 to December 15, 1879.
From: Landgren, Marchal E. AMERICAN PUPILS OF THOMAS COUTURE. New York: Clarke & Way, Inc. and The University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1970: 40.
Person TypeIndividual