Richard Morris Hunt

For more information on Richard Morris Hunt, visit Britannica.com.

(b Chicago, IL, 12 Sept 1935). American sculptor. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1948-50), while working part-time in the zoological laboratory of the University of Chicago. In 1953 he encountered the iron sculptures of Julio Gonz?lez at MOMA, New York, which inspired him to establish his own sculpture workshop. Hunt's first works were experiments with assemblages of found objects: broken machine parts and discarded metal from the junk yards of Chicago. Working first in copper and iron, then aluminium and steel, he constructed a series of 'hybrid figures', which made reference to human, animal and plant forms. In the 1960s his work moved from linear and calligraphic structures to more enclosed and monolithic forms, reflecting his growing interest in rock formations and geology. A leading African-American sculptor, Hunt received early recognition, and his work was featured in many museum and gallery exhibitions in the USA. His first retrospective was in 1967 at the Milwaukee Art Center, University of Wisconsin. His commissions include Expansive Construction (1960) for Louisiana Southern University, Baton Rouge, and Centennial Sculpture (1969) for Loyola University, Chicago. Examples of his work are also in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both New York. In November 1969 he was appointed a member of the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The American architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) was a major contributor to the eclectic style of the 19th century.

Richard Morris Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vt. His father was a lawyer and member of Congress, his mother a painter. He graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1843. He was sent to a military school in Geneva but soon tired of it and entered the studio of the architect Samuel Darier. In 1845 Hunt went to Paris to work with the architect Hector Martin Lefuel. The following year he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. To round out his artistic training, he also studied painting and sculpture. For long periods he traveled in Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt, evidently determined to see everything before beginning his career.

By 1854 Lefuel had appointed Hunt an inspector of construction at the Louvre in Paris. Though urged to remain in Paris, Hunt returned to America. He worked as a draftsman in Washington, and in 1858 he opened his own office in New York. He married Catharine Clinton Howland in 1861.

Hunt's early work was of little consequence; perhaps aware of this, he went to Europe again in the early 1860s. In 1868 he returned to New York and reopened his office. Bolstered by strong determination, Hunt finally profited from his long period of study and architectural gestation as he secured a number of commissions from wealthy New Yorkers. Hunt designed the Studio Building (1857) in New York City, the first building in America strictly for artists. More important, he built one of New York's first skyscrapers, the Tribune Building (1873-1875).

However, Hunt's genius lay in other directions. His home (1870-1871) at Newport, R.I., was a modest precursor of the great residences he was to build. This house combined the style of the Swiss chalet with a French mansard roof, colonial clapboards, and Gothic and Greek revival motifs. In spite of this heterogeneous heritage, the design had unity. Hunt was not an inventor but a clever reinterpreter of styles. As rich patrons began commissioning him to do houses, his designs became larger and more resplendent, remarkable for their richness of materials, color, and ingenuity of design. Some were overgrown and bulky; others were burdened with porches, hanging decorations, and bay windows in a variety of shapes; all were covered by highly irregular roofs.

In the late 1880s and the 1890s Hunt tended to simplify his homes by adhering more closely to adaptations of a single style, usually late French Gothic or Renaissance and Italian Renaissance. "Ochre Court" (1888-1891) in Newport and the William K. Vanderbilt House (1881) in New York City are in the French château style; "The Breakers" (1892-1895), built for Cornelius Vanderbilt, and "Marble House" (1892), both in Newport, are in the Italian Renaissance style. These houses were more homogeneous than Hunt's earlier designs. For George Washington Vanderbilt he designed an enormous country estate, probably the largest in America, called "Biltmore" (1890-1895), near Asheville, N.C. This French château, with ornate Gothic decorations, cost over $4 million and covers 5 acres of the 130,000-acre estate.

More important for the future of architecture than Hunt's buildings were his insistence on high professional standards, his help in founding the American Institute of Architects, and his willingness to train the architects of the next generation in his office.

Further Reading

No attempt has yet been made to write Hunt's biography or to publish a critical catalog of his architectural works. John V. Van Pelt wrote A Monograph of the William K. Vanderbilt House (1925). Biographical information is in Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition and Americans (1955), and James Philip Noffsinger, The Influence of the École des Beaux-Arts on the Architects of the United States (1955).

Additional Sources

Baker, Paul R., Richard Morris Hunt, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980.

sculptor

Personal Information

Born Richard Howard Hunt, September 12, 1935, in Chicago, IL; married first wife, 1957 (divorced 1966); married Lenora Cartright, 1983 (died 1989): children: (first marriage) Cecilia.
Education: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, B.A.E., 1957; also attended University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Chicago.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in U.S. Army, 1958-60.

Career

Traveled in Europe, 1957-58; first one-person show at the Alan Gallery, New York City, 1958; instructor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1960-61, and University of Illinois at Chicago, 1960-62. Works exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Martin Gallery, National Museum of American Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, all in Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Dorsky Gallery, and Terry Dintenfass Gallery, all in New York City; National Museum of Israel, Jerusalem; and the Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna. Visiting professor at several colleges and universities, including Chouinard Art School, Northern Illinois University, and Northwestern University; visiting artist at Yale, Purdue, Wisconsin State, and Southern Illinois universities; artist-in-residence, Harvard University, 1989-90. Board member, American Council for the Arts.

Life's Work

Richard Hunt is an internationally known sculptor whose career has spanned four decades. His abstract works of welded steel and bronze are based on natural forms and have been exhibited in some of the most prestigious museum collections in the United States and abroad, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna, Austria. More than 30 of Hunt's public sculptures are located in and around greater Chicago, where he was born and raised. During the summer of 1992, he created his own versions of biblical icons for Chicago's Holy Angels Church and worked on his most ambitious commission yet, an installation of seven different sculptures for the plaza of the Bennett Williams Building in Washington, D.C.

A characteristic outdoor work by the sculptor is the 30-foot high Eagle Column, completed in 1989 and installed in Jonquil Park, just a few blocks away from Hunt's mid-North Side Chicago studio. Seen by as many as one million people a day who ride the city's elevated railway, the piece was described by the Chicago Tribune as "a quintessential sculpture from this stage" of the artist's career.

Eagle Column exemplifies two significant aspects of Hunt's work: a thematic concern with the past and its relation to the present, and the use and influence of natural forms in abstract sculptures. Eagle Column is rooted in the past, being a monument dedicated to John Peter Altgeld, a liberal governor of Illinois during the 1890s who once lived in the neighborhood around Jonquil Park. Altgeld, whom Hunt characterized for the Chicago Tribune as "a humanist revered by many and scorned by some," was dubbed "the Eagle Forgotten" by American poet and bard Vachel Lindsay, who wrote a long poem about the nineteenth-century politician.

Eagle Column is situated on a semicircular site and consists of a three-piece ensemble of welded bronze towers sitting atop a pink granite base. The following description, taken from the Chicago Tribune, reveals Hunt's treatment of the forms of nature and their relation to the industrial welding techniques required to produce his sculptures: "The base is geometric and architectural, like a squat, square column. As it ascends it tapers, but smaller columns emerge at the corners. Something strange happens near the top: The bronze begins curving, branching, changing direction and spreading, as though it were being poured upside down, splashing into the sky. At the sculpture's apex, nearly 30 feet high, the welded metal tapers into pointed tongues of flame, or wings--some sort of exfoliating natural form erupting into the air."

As Chicago Tribune writer David McCracken noted, Eagle Column displays a characteristic mix of concerns that is found in many of Hunt's sculptures: "wild, natural forms ... rendered in industrial materials and techniques that remind one of the city's factories, its grit and hard edges."

Hunt was born in 1935--in the midst of the Great Depression--on Chicago's South Side. Both of his parents had rural backgrounds, his father being from Georgia and his mother from southern Illinois. Hunt was raised primarily on the South Side, but he spent a few years in grammar school in Galesburg, a small town in Illinois where his parents moved for a time while he was growing up. Throughout his life, Hunt would be equally at home in the city, where he maintained a studio and apartment, and in the country, where he bought a farmhouse on 26 acres in 1974. The artist credited his exposure to the beauties of the countryside as influencing his use of natural forms in his sculpture, although he commented in the Chicago Tribune, "It's not like I go here and there with a sketchbook."

As a young man in the 1940s, Hunt worked in the family barbershop. During this time of almost complete racial segregation, the barbershop was a place where black men discussed the politics of the day. As a result, Hunt began to form his own political and social opinions at an early age. Hunt's mother was a librarian who instilled a love of books and music in her only son. She took him to performances in Chicago by local black opera companies. He learned to play the violin and studied it for years. Hunt developed a particular interest in the works of classical composer George Frideric Handel, and his passion for classical music has remained an important part of his life. The sculptor has even staged musical presentations in his studio. In 1988, for instance, it was the site of the world premiere of a concerto for two violins and chamber orchestra by T. J. Anderson, former head of the music department at Tufts University near Boston.

During his youth, Hunt enjoyed art and music equally; by the time he was in high school, though, he decided that his talent for art was much stronger. He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying there from 1953 to 1957. Having earned a bachelor's degree in art education, he knew he would be able to teach in the Illinois public school system if he proved unsuccessful as an artist.

In order to complete his degree, Hunt was required to take additional courses at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago. To help pay for his tuition, he worked in the University of Chicago's zoology laboratories. Hunt told the Chicago Tribune that his early and continuing interest in the biological sciences and history "played a part" in his "sculptural development."

Shortly after he graduated in 1957, Hunt married a classmate and fellow artist. They were wed for nearly a decade and had one daughter, Cecilia, before divorcing. Hunt was single for the next 17 years; then, in 1983, he married Lenora Cartright. She enjoyed a distinguished career as a dean at the University of Illinois, a city official under Chicago mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington, and a consultant on human affairs and community relations. After she died unexpectedly of liver cancer in 1989, Hunt organized the Lenora Cartright-Hunt Chicago Student Emergency Fund in her honor.

Hunt first distinguished himself as a sculptor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a substantial number of scholarships and museum prizes. He won the Art Institute's Logan Prize three times, the Palmer Prize in 1957, and the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel fellowship that same year. While still a student, Hunt was "discovered" by New York gallery owner Charles Alan, who first saw the artist's work in Chicago and bought a piece. He also signed Hunt up as an Alan Gallery regular, promising him a one-person show after he graduated.

The travel fellowship that Hunt won in 1957 enabled him to spend the next year in England, France, Italy, and Spain. He was influenced there by the boom in British sculpture and by the works of Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez. When Hunt returned to the United States, he was drafted into the army, where he became an official army artist. His assignments involved mostly graphic designs for posters, signs, and charts.

Hunt went into the army in 1958--about the same time his first show was opening at the Alan Gallery in New York. The show, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times by Dore Ashton, consisted primarily of welded structures made from pipes, rods, and "oddments." Ashton noted that while other sculptors working in this medium tended to present "frontal views [and] project linear drawings in space," Hunt's work was more satisfying. "In his carefully finished compositions there is a graceful continuity. Larger volumes are balanced by soaring, tapered lines, or an asymmetrical axis supports the suggestion of radiating forms in transition," the reviewer commented.

The role of natural forms in Hunt's sculpture was apparent in his first show. Ashton observed that "although most of Hunt's sculptures are abstractions, they do suggest observation of the living forms of nature," and went on to praise the works as being "inventively varied, clustered at times with mysterious deep shadows ... or vibrating in close sequences." It was an auspicious debut for the 23-year-old sculptor, who one year earlier had made his first sale to the Museum of Modern Art.

Hunt settled back in Chicago after his stint in the army, teaching briefly from 1960 to 1962 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois. Steady sales through New York galleries led him to embark on a career as a full-time artist. Although he lived and worked in Chicago and had been born and raised there, Hunt did not want to be identified solely as a "Chicago" artist. Ever since the 1960s, Hunt has shown his works regularly at New York galleries as well as at university galleries throughout the United States.

Although he had a degree in art education to fall back on, Hunt never had a desire to teach full time. Throughout his career, though, he has accepted many invitations to serve as visiting artist or visiting professor at various colleges and universities. He spent the 1989-90 academic year at Harvard University as artist-in-residence.

Hunt received his first commission for a public sculpture in the mid-1960s, but it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that demand for his works increased. By this time, he was welding many of his sculptures in aluminum, bronze, and steel, rather than copper and iron, which he had used to construct his earlier works. And the size and density of his sculptures increased over the decades, leading to the huge spatial undertakings of the 1980s.

By the 1990s, public commissions made up an estimated 75 percent of his output. Through these large outdoor and indoor public pieces, Hunt was able to combine self-expression with the need to serve a public purpose. According to Frank Getlein in the Smithsonian, "Some of his most important works refer to or come out of the black experience in America." Notable examples include I Have Been to the Mountain, a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., located in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was slain, and Freedmen's Column, located at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Jacob's Ladder, installed at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library on Chicago's South Side, is a metaphor for knowledge and opportunity. Hung in a 27-foot-high atrium with a skylight overhead, the work consists of "two giant welded-bronze 'arms' reaching down toward the floor, each [with] a pair of great claws at its end," noted Getlein. "One pair holds a slight, somewhat twisted ladder. The other is empty, claws open." Its title alludes to the biblical theme of human aspiration and the pursuit of higher goals; its location in a library devoted primarily to African American study adds to its meaning.

Hunt acquired his mid-North Side Chicago studio in 1971. The building used to serve as an electrical substation generating power for Chicago's trolley lines. When the artist moved in, it already had a full-sized crane and load-bearing support system in place. Hunt has opened his studio to visitors in an effort to make his works more accessible to the public. Some of his larger pieces have actually outgrown the studio. Freeform, a three-ton stainless steel sculpture, had to be completed at a Michigan-based machine fabricating site. Hunt has also utilized the technical expertise of the workers at Bert Jensen and Sons metal fabricating factory in Racine, Wisconsin. And in the 1990s, the sculptor began to spend more time outside Chicago at his farmhouse in nearby McHenry County. He works on smaller scale pieces there, including models for his larger public commissions and architectural designs of settings for his works.

Hunt's techniques for creating welded metal sculptures are, in his words, "more or less industrial." He is on record as stating that he was always interested in the relation between those techniques--cutting, burning, and beating the metal and often treating it with acid--and natural organic imagery. Hunt told the Smithsonian: "Artists no longer must imitate nature, but are free to interpret it. Sometimes I try to develop forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her."

Responding to a recent catalog essay that called his work "life-affirming" because of its use of natural forms, Hunt told the Chicago Tribune, "I like the use of 'life-affirming.' That's what I think sculpture, and art in general, should be about. I think of my work as a celebration of life in form. In my case, it's achieved through welded or cast metal."

A comparative exhibit titled "Richmond Barthe and Richard Hunt: Two Sculptors, Two Eras," toured selected cities in the United States in 1992 and 1993. The show brought together Hunt's works with those of Harlem Renaissance artist/sculptor Barthe, a traditionalist who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 30 years before Hunt. Several art critics and observers point to a correspondence in the form and content of the artists' works--especially in their renderings of themes central to the African American experience. Alan G. Artner commented in the Chicago Tribune: "Barthe's figurative work and Hunt's abstractions are, of course, dissimilar. But ... it appears as if the younger man is paying homage to the older with semi-abstractions that seem to take off from [Barthe's originals]." Selected works Extending Horizontal Form, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1958. I Have Been to the Mountain, Memphis, TN, 1977. Jacob's Ladder, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago, IL, 1977. Eagle Column, Jonquil Park, Chicago, IL, 1989. Freedmen's Column, Howard University, Washington, DC, 1989. Wisdom Bridge, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, 1990. Freeform, State of Illinois Center, Chicago, 1993.

Awards

Logan Prize, 1956, 1961, and 1962; Palmer Prize and James Nelson Raymond Travel fellowship, both 1957; Campana Prize, 1962; Sidney R. Yates Arts Advocacy Award, 1990; fellow of the Guggenheim, Ford, and Cassandra foundations.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Artists, edited by Colin Naylor, St. James Press, 1989.

• Art in America, October 1984, p. 193; July 1993, p. 109.
• ARTnews, Summer 1969; May 1983, p. 160.
• Arts Magazine, April 1962, p. 53.
• Chicago Tribune, October 23, 1989, sec. 2C, p. 1; February 28, 1991, sec. 1, p. 22; May 31, 1991, sec. 7, p. 72; August 11, 1991, sec. 18NW, p. 1; July 31, 1992, sec. 7, p. 69.
• Ebony, August 1983, p. 180; August 1991, p. 6.
• New York Times, September 30, 1958; May 18, 1968; April 19, 1969; April 27, 1969; April 14, 1989, p. C25.
• Smithsonian, July 1990, p. 60.
• Washington Post, January 15, 1993, sec. WW, p. 53.

— David Bianco

American architect, the first to be trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (from 1846). He worked in the office of Lefuel, and assisted during construction at the Louvre from 1854, designing the Pavillon de la Bibliothèque. In 1855 he settled in the USA where he used his knowledge of French Renaissance Revival architecture to great effect. His works included the Studio Building (1857–8—demolished), Lenox Library (1870–7—demolished), and the Tribune Building (1873–6—one of the first tall buildings equipped with ‘elevators’—demolished), all in NYC, and a series of grand private houses, including the French Gothic Vanderbilt Mansion (Biltmore House), Asheville, NC (1888–95), and several at Newport, RI, including the Stick-style Griswold House (1861–3), and the Neo-Classical Vanderbilt Mansion (Marble House, 1888–92). Even though he was the most nationally and internationally honoured American architect of the time, a great many of his buildings have been demolished. His grand Beaux-Arts Classical entrance-wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (1894–1902), was completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt (1862–1931).

Bibliography

• ARe, v/2 (1895), 97–180
• P. Baker (1980)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Stein (ed.) (1986)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

For other persons named Richard Hunt, see Richard Hunt (disambiguation).

Richard Morris Hunt

Home of William K. Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue, New York. Built 1885, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Later demolished

Richard Morris Hunt (October 31, 1827 – July 31, 1895) was an American architect of the nineteenth century and a preeminent figure in the history of American architecture. Hunt was, according to design critic Paul Goldberger writing in The New York Times, "American architecture's first, and in many ways its greatest, statesman."^[1] Aside from Hunt's sculpting of the face of New York City, including designs for the facade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and many Fifth Avenue mansions lost to the wrecking ball,^[2] Hunt founded both the American Institute of Architects and the Municipal Art Society.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Residential Works 3 Churches 4 Commercial 5 Public Buildings 6 Honors 7 Sources 8 References 9 External links 10 Further reading 11 See also

Biography

Home of Henry G. Marquand, Madison Ave., New York. Built 1884, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Later demolished

Born at Brattleboro, Vermont, Hunt was the son of Jane Maria Leavitt, born to an influential family of Suffield, Connecticut, and Hon. Jonathan Hunt, a U.S. congressman whose own father was the lieutenant governor of Vermont, and scion of a wealthy and prominent Vermont family.^[3] Richard Morris Hunt was the brother of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, and the photographer and lawyer Leavitt Hunt. (Hunt was named for Lewis Richard Morris, a family relation,^[4] who was a U.S. Congressman from Vermont and the nephew of Gouverneur Morris, an author of large parts of the U.S. Constitution.)^[5]

Following the early death of his father, Hunt's mother took the family to Europe, where they remained for more than a decade, first in Switzerland and later in Paris. Hunt began his education at the Boston Latin School. Following Hunt's 1843 graduation from Boston Latin,^[6] young Hunt left with his family for Europe, where he studied art, and where he was encouraged to pursue architecture by his older brother William, a painter, and by his mother, who had been denied the chance to paint herself.^[7]

Hunt later entered the Paris atelier of Hector Lefuel in 1846. The aspiring architect Hunt became the first American to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hunt's mentor Lefuel later permitted him to supervise work on the Louvre museum, which Lefuel and Louis Visconti were renovating for Napoleon III, as well as to design the Pavillon de la Bibliothèque (“Library Pavilion”), prominently situated opposite the Palais-Royal.^[8] Hunt would later regale aspiring young architect Louis Sullivan with stories of his work on the New Louvre in Lefuel's atelier libre.^[9]

After his return in 1855, 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, brought the first apartment building to Manhattan in a burst of scandal, and set a new ostentatious style of grand houses for the social elite and the eccentric, competitive new millionaires of the Gilded Age.

Facade of Yale University's Scroll and Key Society, displaying Moorish gate and patterned forecourt

Hunt's greatest influence was his insistence that architects be treated, and paid, as legitimate and respected professionals equivalent to doctors and lawyers. He sued one of his early clients for non-payment of his five percent fee, which established an important legal precedent. One of his 1859 students at the Tenth Street Studio, William Robert Ware, was deeply influenced by Hunt and went on to found the first two university programs in architecture: MIT in 1866, and Columbia in 1881.

His extensive social connections in Newport ^[10] among the richest Americans of his generation, were informed by his energy and good humor. Legend has it that while on a final walk-through of one of his Vanderbilt mansions, Hunt discovered a mysterious tent-like object in one of the ballrooms. Investigating, he found it was canvas covering a life-sized statue of himself, dressed in stonecutters' clothes, all carved in secret as a tribute by the gang of stonecutters working on the house. Vanderbilt permitted the statue to be placed on the roof of the mansion.

Most who came into contact with Hunt came away struck by the man. On their first meeting in 1869 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of "one remarkable person new to me, Richard Hunt the architect. His conversation was spirited beyond any I remember, loaded with matter, and expressed with the vigour and fury of a member of the Harvard boat or ball club relating to the adventures of one of their matches; inspired, meantime, throughout, with fine theories of the possibilities of art."^[11]

Hunt's folksy manner, lack of pretense and unbridled enthusiasm led Emerson to gush, "I could only think of the immense advantage which a thinking soul possesses when horsed on a robust and vivacious temperament. The combination is so rare of an Irish labourer's nerve and elasticity with Winckelmann's experience and cultivation as to fill one with immense hope of great results when he meets it in the New York of to-day."

Statue of Liberty, Pedestal by Richard Morris Hunt

Hunt designed New York's Tribune Building, one of the earliest with an elevator, in 1873. Other buildings of note that Hunt designed include the Theological Library and Marquand Chapel in Princeton, the Scroll and Key building at Yale, and the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard. Until the Lenox Library, none of Hunt's American works were in the Beaux-Arts style with which he is associated. Late in his life he became involved in the Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, at which his Administration Building received the gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Hostelling International - New York (formerly American Youth Hostels) on the east blockfront of Amsterdam Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets in Manhattan originally built for the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue facade designed by Richard Morris Hunt

In New York City, Hunt's handiwork can be seen on the austere pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and on the elegant 5th Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The only one of Hunt's New York City buildings that has not been destroyed now houses Hostelling International - New York (formerly American Youth Hostels) on the east blockfront of Amsterdam Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets in Manhattan. Erected in 1883 and entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, the red-brick building features dormer windows and a mansard roof similar to those Hunt used on his Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, pictured below on this page. This popular youth hostel was originally built for the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, a charity created in 1813 with the help of financier Peter G. Stuyvesant (a descendant of the Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant) and John J. Astor. In later years it was used as a nursing home, but by the 1970s was abandoned and became a burned-out "shooting gallery" used by drug dealers and derelicts. Its current use as a flagship youth hostel came into being in 1988. According to an article in The New York Times:

The project is a rare collaborative effort involving a West Side community group, a midtown developer, an international foundation, two Wall Street securities firms, seven government agencies and 300 profit-seeking investors in 30 states.....In 1980, the city's Office of Economic Development awarded a grant to Valley Restoration, which in turn hired the consulting firm of Buckhurst, Fish, Hutton & Katz to study the feasibility of converting the building into a hostel. The consultants concluded that a youth hostel containing 477 beds was feasible, along with a restaurant of 126 seats and a small theater. Efforts were then made to bring together community leaders, a youth hostel organization and a developer to put forward a plan.

The financing of this successful preservation and re-use project was unusual. According to the Times article:

The developer was Bertram Lewis, chairman of Sybedon, a group of Manhattan investment bankers specializing in high-stakes real estate deals....The terms of a 1984 agreement between the three groups had Valley Restoration buying the property from the city, which had acquired it in a 1978 tax foreclosure action. The $687,500 price was a payment to Valley from a limited partnership consisting of Sybedon and a group of investors. Last December a public offering of shares through Thomson McKinnon Securities raised $5.2 million from 300 investors in 30 states. The Metropolitan New York Council of American Youth Hostels agreed to manage the building and channel profits from the fees for the rooms back to the limited partnership to repay the investors.

Grave of Richard Morris Hunt at Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery

Among the employees who worked in Hunt's firm was Franco-American architect and fellow Ecole des Beaux Arts graduate Emmanuel Louis Masqueray when went on to be Chief of Design at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Hunt often employed sculptor Karl Bitter to enrich his designs. Both Hunt and his frequent collaborator, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, were associated with the City Beautiful Movement, and Hunt was the first president of the Municipal Art Society that grew out of the movement. Nevertheless, Olmstead, an advocate of "naturalistic" architecture and landscape design famously clashed with Hunt in 1863 over Hunt's proposal for "Scholar's Gate", a formal entrance to Central Park at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue. According to Central Park historian Sarah Cedar Miller, Central Park Commissioner and influential New Yorker Andrew Haswell Green, was a major supporter of Hunt. When the park commissioners adopted Hunt's design, Olmstead and his partner Calvert Vaux protested and resigned their positions with the Central Park project. Hunt's plan for Scholar's Gate was never built and Olmstead and Vaux subsequently rejoined the project.^[12] Nevertheless, there were to be other reminders of Hunt in Central Park.

Hunt died in 1895 and was buried at the Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1898, 3 years after Hunt's death in Newport, the Municipal Art Society commissioned the Richard Morris Hunt Memorial, designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Bruce Price.^[13] The memorial is installed in the wall of Central Park across Fifth Avenue from today’s Frick Museum at 70th Street. Following Hunt's death, his son Richard Howland Hunt took over the practice his father had established.

Among the many projects Richard Howland Hunt finished was the great entrance hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for which his father, a Metropolitan trustee, had made the initial sketches in 1894, having earlier designed the Museum's Fifth Avenue facade.^[14]

Marble House, Newport, Rhode Island

Richard Morris Hunt Memorial, Fifth Avenue, New York City

Residential Works

• H. B. Hollins' Country Estate, "Meadow Farm", East Islip, NY
• J.N.A. Griswold House, Newport, RI 1863–64
• Marshall Field House, Prairie Avenue, Chicago, 1873
• Henry Marquand House, NYC, 1881–84 ^[15]
• James Pinchot House, Grey Towers, Milford, Pennsylvania 1884–86
• William Borden House, Chicago, Illinois, 1884–89
• Ogden Mills House, Fifth Avenue, NYC, 1885–87
• Château de Montméry (Theodore Haviland), Ambazac, Haute Vienne (87), France, 1885
• Archibald Rogers House, Hyde Park New York, 1886–89
• William Kissam Vanderbilt House, Marble House, Newport, Rhode Island, 1888–92
• William Kissam Vanderbilt, Residence, New York, 1879–82.
• J.R. Busk House, "Indian Springs", presently known as Wrentham House, Newport, Rhode Island, 1889–92
• Ogden Goelet House, "Ochre Court", Newport, Rhode Island, 1888–93
• Oliver Belmont House, "Belcourt Castle", Newport, Rhode Island, 1891
• Elbridge Gerry House, NYC, 1891–94 Newport, Rhode Island,
• John Jacob Astor IV House, Fifth Avenue, NYC, 1891–95
• Dorsheimer-Busk House, Newport, Rhode Island, 1890–93
• George Washington Vanderbilt House, "Biltmore Estate", the largest private mansion in America (pictured below) Asheville, North Carolina, 1890-
• Cornelius Vanderbilt II house, "The Breakers", Newport, Rhode Island, 1892–95

Churches

• St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Islip, Long Island, New York [2]

Commercial

• New York Tribune Building, Park Place, New York, 1873.

Public Buildings

• Howland Cultural Center (Howland Library), Beacon, NY, designed for Hunt's brother-in-law Joseph Howland, Howland Cultural Center
• Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1892–95 (demolished and replaced).
• Administration Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 ^[16]

Honors

• Honorary Doctorate, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (first architect to receive the honor) ^[17]
• Gold Medal, Royal Institute of British Architects (first American architect to be so honored)
• Honorary member, Académie française
• Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France ^[18]

Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina, designed by Richard Morris Hunt

Sources

• Great Buildings Online
• Durante, Dianne, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide (New York University Press, 2007): brief summary of Hunt's career and description of Daniel Chester French's Hunt memorial in Central Park, New York.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Richard Morris Hunt

1. ^ Architecture: Two Richard Morris Hunt Shows, Paul Goldberger, The New York Times, May 22, 1986
2. ^ The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. I, Published by the Harvard Graduates' Magazine Association, Boston, 1893
3. ^ The History of the Descendants of John Dwight, of Dedham, Mass., Benjamin Woodbridge Dwight, New York, 1874
4. ^ Lewis Richard Morris was married to Ellen Hunt, sister of Richard Morris Hunt's father.General Lewis R. Morris House, Springfield, Vt., National Register, Connecticut River Joint Commissions, crjc.org
5. ^ Obituary of Richard Morris Hunt, The New York Times, August 1, 1895
6. ^ Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–2000, Douglass Shand-Tucci, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, ISBN 1558492011, 9781558492011
7. ^ Puritan Boston & Quaker Philadelphia, Edward Digby Baltzell, Published by Transaction Publishers, 1996, ISBN 156000830X
8. ^ The History of the Descendants of John Dwight, of Dedham, Mass., Vol. I, Benjamin W. Dwight, Published by John F. Trow & Son, New York, 1874
9. ^ Louis Sullivan, Prophet of Modern Architecture, Hugh Morrison, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998
10. ^ Hunt himself lived during the season in Newport, where his wife, the New York City heiress Catherine Clinton Howland, had extensive family connections.
11. ^ Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864–1876, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Waldo Emerson Forbes, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1914
12. ^ Miller, Sara Cedar: Central Park, An American Masterpiece p. 57. Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2003 ISBN 0-8109-3946-0.
13. ^ [1] History of the Municipal Art Society (official site)
14. ^ Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects, 1860–1940, Robert B. MacKay, Anthony K. Baker, Carol A. Traynor, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997
15. ^ Henry Gurdon Marquand joined Charles McKim as a pallbearer at Hunt's funeral.
16. ^ Gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.
17. ^ The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. I, William Roscoe Thayer, The Harvard Graduates' Magazine Association, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1893
18. ^ The Look of Architecture, Witold Rybczynski, Oxford University Press, 2003

• Baker, Paul, Richard Morris Hunt, MIT Press, 1980
• Stein, Susan Editor, The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt, University of Chicago Press, 1986
• Kvaran. Einar Einarsson, Architectural Sculpture of America

External links

• Richard Morris Hunt grave, Island Cemetery, Newport, Rhode Island
• Obituary, Richard Morris Hunt, The New York Times, August 1, 1889
• nyc-architecture.com
• Richard Morris Hunt collection, The Octagon Museum, The Museum of The American Architectural Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Further reading

• Exploration, Vision & Influence: The Art World of Brattleboro's Hunt Family, Catalogue, Museum Exhibition, The Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, June 23–December 31, 2005, Paul R. Baker, Sally Webster, David Hanlon, and Stephen Perkins

See also

• Thaddeus Leavitt, William Morris Hunt, Leavitt Hunt, Jonathan Hunt (Vermont Representative), Jonathan Hunt (Vermont Lieutenant Governor)

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