William Morris Hunt

William Morris Hunt (March 31, 1824 – September 8, 1879) was an American painter.

Born into the embassy Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris following the realist Jean-François Millet and studied below him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a thesame group upon his reward to America. He became Boston's leading portrait and landscape painter, also energetic as a lithographer and sculptor. In 1871 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Many of his works were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Another disaster was the deterioration of the rock panels in the State Capitol at Albany, New York, on which a number of his murals had been painted. This is believed to have led to his depression and presumed suicide.