Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, and the bicentenary of the birth of William Morris Hunt, a major Boston artist who has the distinction of being one of the few painters of the Barbizon School outside France. I therefore celebrate his two-hundredth birthday one day early.
William Morris Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, into one of the state’s wealthy and artistic families. His father was a Congressman, but died young. His widow decided to take their children with her to Europe, where they would be able to learn to draw and paint in the best academies.
The family travelled through Switzerland, the south of France, and Rome, before William and his younger brother Richard settled in Paris, as students. William had originally intended to be a sculptor, and had already started his training in Düsseldorf between 1845-6. Then, while Richard attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris studying architecture (the first American to do so), brother William attended it to study painting under Thomas Couture, until 1852.
His younger brother Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) went on to become a pre-eminent figure in American architecture, responsible for the design of the New York Tribune Building, William K Vanderbilt House, Marble House (Newport, RI), the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.
William became a great friend of Jean-François Millet, and from him learned the style of the Barbizon School.
Hunt painted Girl at the Fountain (1852–54), when he was learning Barbizon style with Millet, near Paris. This painting was clearly not one that had any influence from Millet, and may date from his time with Couture instead.
After leaving Paris, Hunt returned via Newport, RI, Brattleboro, Faial Island in the Azores, and finally settled in Boston in 1855. His early paintings in Boston were mainly portraits, but tragically many of them, together with his drawings, and five large paintings by Millet that he owned, were all destroyed in the Great Boston Fire in 1872.
The Listeners (c 1859) appears more typical of a British Victorian piece from that time, but includes a fine study of the interlocked hands of the two women.
Hunt’s portraiture practice rapidly became successful, with all the wealthiest Bostonians, known as Boston Brahmins, wanting him to paint them. He was also a prolific print-maker, and sculptor.
The outbreak of the Civil War was probably the motivation behind Hunt’s unashamedly militaristic Drummer Boy (c 1862), confirmed by the inscription on the plinth below the boy’s feet 1861 U.S. VOLUNTEERS 1 1862. Behind him, the clouds are darkening with an incoming storm.
Hunt travelled back to Europe on several occasions, and it’s probable that he painted this Italian Girl and her male companion during one of those visits in 1867.
The Ball Players (1871) shows three men playing baseball on a rough field. It was painted in the year that the first professional league was established, when the game was growing rapidly in popularity, and seems to have been one of the earliest paintings showing the US national sport.
After 1870, Hunt turned more to landscapes, where his loose style was particularly apparent. Those landscapes were a significant influence over the work of Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, and others. He taught John La Farge and William James, until the latter decided to concentrate on his writing. He also promoted the paintings of European artists, including those of his friend Millet, and his writings on art became popular. Among his circle in Boston were figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William James, and Erastus Brigham Bigelow, an inventor of weaving machines who was one of the founders of MIT.
Hunt painted a few works showing farm animals and activities, including his Plowing (1876). The team shown is made up of two horses and two oxen, as was unusual at the time. This is one of his most overtly Barbizon paintings: tonal, relatively dark (although much of that may be old varnish), painterly, with predominantly earth colours.
In other paintings, he appears to have painted more like Corot than Millet, as in his Sand Bank with Willows, Magnolia from 1877. Although the landscape is hardly imposing, the young boy and his younger sister appear small in comparison to the low trees. There’s another child to the left of that boy, apparently trying to climb a tree.
His Landscape is undated, but was probably painted during the 1870s. Although his marks are gestural, and the cloud banks rich in brushmarks, it’s still tonal with muted colours.
In 1877, Hunt painted two subtly different versions of the same motif, and produced an engraving: The Bathers (above) is the slightly larger version now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the other version, now in Worcester Art Museum (cofounded by Bigelow’s daughter Helen Bigelow Merriman), is shown below. Like other painters at the time, Hunt had trained himself to be able to paint entirely from memory, a feat promoted in several books and courses in the nineteenth century, before photography became commonplace.
According to Helen M Knowlton, who wrote his biography in 1899, Hunt was driving past a cove on the Charles River one day when he saw two young men in the water. One, his feet apparently on the bed of the river, had the second standing on his shoulders, naked and ready to dive into the water. Hunt drove back into town, made a charcoal sketch from memory, then later completed these two substantial paintings of the scene.
In the late 1870s, Hunt was commissioned to paint murals in the New York State Capitol Building at Albany, New York. Winged Fortune (1878) is his study for the figure of Fortune within them. The Capitol was constructed over a protracted period between 1867 and 1899. In the end, Hunt only completed two, named The Flight of Night and The Discoverer, each about 15 m in length, and painted directly onto the sandstone wall of the Assembly Chamber. Unfortunately, they became damaged by moisture, and started to flake; then the chamber’s vaulted ceiling was found to be unstable, and had to be lowered to cover them.
His last and greatest landscapes are views of the Niagara Falls (1878): this is probably the most famous of those, and shows the Canadian Horseshoe falls from the Canadian side, a view almost identical to that painted by Frederic Edwin Church in 1857.
Niagara (1879) was painted from the other side, and is unusual for his use of casein paints rather than oils. They use milk protein as binder, making them a distemper with water as their diluent. They dry as quickly as egg tempera, but can be reworked for a period until the binder has fully hardened. They were popular among commercial artists until the advent of acrylic paints in the late 1960s, and underwent phases of popularity among fine art painters as well.
In his later years, Hunt suffered from bouts of depression, probably as part of bipolar disorder, and his death at the Isle of Shoals, New Hampshire, in 1879 was thought to have been suicide. In addition to major collections of his work in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenaeum, further major paintings of his are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, as well as most other substantial collections in the USA.
References
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