Richard Morris Hunt

Richard Morris Hunt October 31, 1827 – July 31, 1895 was an American architect of the nineteenth century and an eminent figure in a history of American architecture. He helped category New York City with his designs for the 1902 entrance façade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty Liberty Enlightening the World, and many Fifth Avenue mansions since destroyed.

Hunt is also renowned for his Biltmore Estate, America's largest private house, almost Asheville, North Carolina, and for his elaborate summer cottages in Newport, Rhode Island, which breed a new standard of ostentation for the social elite and the newly minted millionaires of the Gilded Age.

Early life

Hunt was born at Brattleboro, Vermont into the prominent Hunt family. His father, Jonathan Hunt, was a lawyer and U.S. congressman, whose own father, Jonathan Hunt, senior, was lieutenant governor of Vermont. Hunt's mother, Jane Maria Leavitt, was the daughter of Thaddeus Leavitt, Jr., a merchant, and a unit of the influential Leavitt family of Suffield, Connecticut.

Richard Morris Hunt was named for Lieut. Richard Morris, an officer in the U.S. Navy, a son of Hunt's aunt, whose husband Lewis Richard Morris was a U.S. Congressman from Vermont and the nephew of Gouverneur Morris, author of large parts of the U.S. Constitution. Hunt was the brother of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, and the photographer and lawyer Leavitt Hunt.

Following the death of his father in Washington, D.C. in 1832 at the age of 44, Hunt's mother moved her family to New Haven, then in 1837 to New York, and then in the spring of 1838 to Boston. There, Hunt enrolled in the Boston Latin School, while his brother William enrolled in Harvard College. However, in the summer of 1842, William left Harvard, transferring to a school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, while Richard was covered to school in Sandwich, Massachusetts.