William Morris Hunt

William Morris Hunt did as much as almost anyone to turn American painters toward France. In the 1850s he worked at Barbizon, the village outside Paris where a group of painters had left the studio to paint peasants and open country, and he became a devoted friend and pupil of Jean-François Millet, the greatest of them. When Hunt settled in Boston he brought Millet's canvases and Millet's ideas with him.

For two decades he stood at the centre of Boston's art life, painting portraits of the city's leading families and teaching a wide circle, among them the young William James before James turned to philosophy. The great Boston fire of 1872 destroyed a store of his own work along with several Millets he owned, a blow he never fully recovered from.

In 1879, worn down and in poor health after finishing a set of large murals for the New York State Capitol, Hunt drowned in a shallow pond on Appledore Island off the New Hampshire coast, while staying with the poet Celia Thaxter.