William Morris HUNT (1824-1879) ✿

William Morris Hunt (1824 – 1879) was an American painter. 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. In his later years he worked on the decoration of the Capitol in Washington.

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.