William Morris Hunt

In 1845 William Morris Hunt was 21, a Vermont congressman's son who had left Harvard without a degree and was travelling in Europe with his widowed mother and his brothers. In Rome he had tried his hand at sculpture. Then, in Italy, he met Emanuel Leutze, the German-born American painter, who urged him to come north to the art academy in Düsseldorf. Leutze painted this small portrait of him there. Hunt stayed about a year. The academy's slow, drill-like teaching did not suit him, and in 1846 he left to join his family in Paris, planning to study sculpture. There he saw The Falconer, a painting by Thomas Couture, and he went into Couture's studio as a painter instead. The portrait stayed with the Hunt family for more than 140 years. It came up at auction in New York in March 1988 and reached the museum as a gift that same month.