Personal Data

Richard Morris Hunt was born on October 31, 1827, in Brattleboro, Vermont, the son of Jonathan Hunt and his wife Jane Maria Leavitt.  His brother was the noted painter, William Morris Hunt.

On April 2, 1861, he married Catherine Clinton Howland, daughter of Samuel S. Howland.

Richard Morris Hunt died on July 31, 1895, in Newport, Rhode Island.

Career

Richard Morris Hunt graduated from Boston Latin School in 1843, after which he briefly attended military school in Geneva and then went to work in the studio of Samuel Darier in Geneva.  In 1845, he joined the atelier of Hector Martin Lefuel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  He remained in Paris until 1855, when he returned to America and worked as a draftsman under Thomas U. Walter, on the Capitol in Washington.  He then moved to New York, and in 1858 established his own office.  Among his apprentices and students were William Ware and Henry Van Brunt, who later formed the prominent Boston firm of Ware and Van Brunt.

In the late 1860s, Hunt designed Stuyvesant Flats (1869-1870), the first apartment house in New York.  He also was the designer the Roosevelt Building in New York (1873-1874); the New York Tribune Building (1876); William K. Vanderbilt’s mansion (1878) at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street; the main portion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the base of the Statue of Liberty; the National Observatory in Washington; several prominent Newport residences (including the Vanderbilt’s Marble House“=); and George W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House (1890) in Ashville, North Carolina.

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