Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt
B. 1828 Brattleboro, Vermont
D. 1895 Newport, Rhode Island
Richard Morris Hunt trained in Paris where he went to visit for a year with his mother—a trip that was prolonged into a decade long stay. At first he studied at the studio of a distinguished Parisian architect, Hector Martin Lefuel, and then more formally, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1846 Hunt was the first American architect to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, winning the school’s highest prize, the Grand Prix de Rome. Hunt was regarded well enough to supervise work on the Louvre under Napoleon III. He was appointed inspector of works on buildings in Paris and worked on connecting the Tuilleries with the Louvre and The Library Pavillion opposite the Palais Royale. Although he had a promising career in France, he returned to work in the United States in 1855 on the strength of his mother’s letters saying “there was no place in the world where they (the fine arts) are more needed, or where they should be more encouraged”.
Upon his return to the United States, he worked with T.U. Walter on the extensions of the Capitol at Washington, D.C. Both Hunt and his frequent collaborator, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, were associated with the City Beautiful Movement. Hunt founded the first American architectural school at his Tenth Street Studio Building (beginning with only four students), co-founded the American Institute of Architects and from 1888 to 1891 served as the Institute's third president. He brought the first apartment building to Manhattan and set a new grand style of houses for the social elite. Referred to as “the man who gilded the Gilded Age” because his work was imitative of the European historic styles, Hunt is nevertheless, credited as one of the fathers of American architecture. He designed private homes, (the mansions on 5th Avenue for Henry G. Marquand, W.K.Vanderbuilt, J.J. Astor), summer houses (the “cottages” Marble House for W.K.Vanderbuilt, The Breakers for his brother at Newport, Rhode Island), monuments (the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty), commercial structures (The Tribune Building in New York, one of the first buildings with an elevator) and public buildings, (The Administration building at Chicago’s World’s Columbian exposition in1893). In New York City, Hunt's designs can be seen on the elegant 5th Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1898, three years after Hunt's death in Newport, Rhode Island, the Municipal Art Society commissioned the Richard Morris Hunt Memorial, designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Bruce Price. The memorial is installed in the wall of Central Park across Fifth Avenue from today’s Frick Museum at 70th Street.