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Hunt’s studies in Europe in the 1840s and ‘50s brought him into contact with Jean François Millet and the Barbizon School.

Hunt returned to America in 1855 and settled in Boston in 1862.

The Renaissance costume of this figure suggests a growing interest in that historical period, one that was also reflected in furniture and other decorative arts of the 1860s and ‘70s.

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William Morris Hunt

Ideal Head, about 1865

oil on paper mounted on canvas

21 ½ x 17 ½ in.

Daniel P. Erwin Fund

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William Morris Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vermont and raised in a prominent family  in New Haven, Connecticut.  His brother, Richard Morris Hunt, was the architect of the Vanderbilt houses “Biltmore” and “The Breakers.” William Hunt attended Harvard University where he studied sculpture, but left after his sophomore year to study in Europe.  He enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany but was dissatisfied with its academic training and went to Paris to pursue his sculpture career.  His rigid academic training caused him to rebel making Hunt looked toward the French landscape painters in the village of Barbizon, where the artists focused on scenes of peasants working in the fields.  Hunt returned to America, first settling in Newport Rhode Island and then in Boston.  He was particularly associated with Cape Ann and Gloucester in Massachusetts, painting the area in the tradition of the Barbizon School with an occasional venture into Impressionism.  Hunt is remembered for bringing the Barbizon style to America and as a teacher, muralist and portrait painter.

Ideal Head shows Hunt’s adaptation of Renaissance Venetian techniques in which sepia toned under painting shows through layers of glazes, and thicker, spontaneous strokes complete the picture.  To concentrate attention on the subject’s mood, he placed the darkly modeled figure against a simple, shallow background.  Hunt painted several such heads, and may have intended this young man’s sensitive features and costume to suggest ideal qualities that many 19^th-century artists associated with the Italian Renaissance. 

Reference

Sally Webster.  William Morris Hunt, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN-13: 978-0521345835