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Richard Morris Hunt was born on October 31, 1827 at Brattleboro, Vermont. Hunt was a son of Jane Maria Leavitt, born to an influential family of Suffield, Connecticut.
His father was a lawyer and member of Congress, his mother was a painter.
He graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1843.
Following a preliminary period of education in the United States, he went to Paris to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and was the first native-born American to receive a diploma from the Ecole.
Hunt's early work was of little consequence; perhaps aware of this, he went to Europe again in the early 1866.
In 1868 he returned to New York and reopened his office.
However, Hunt's genius lay in other directions.
His home (1870 - 1871) at Newport, Rhode Island, was a modest precursor of the great residences he was to build.
This house combined the style of the Swiss chalet with a French mansard roof, colonial clapboards, and Gothic and Greek revival motifs.
Some were overgrown and bulky; others were burdened with porches, hanging decorations, and bay windows in a variety of shapes; all were covered by highly irregular roofs.
In the late 1886 and the 1896 Hunt tended to simplify his homes by adhering more closely to adaptations of a single style, usually late French Gothic or Renaissance and Italian Renaissance.
Hunt was much influenced by French models, and his first commission, the Rossiter house in New York, indicated his love for the French Renaissance.
Hunt was competent in other styles, however, as is indicated in his designs for the Lenox Library, New York, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D. C. , and the Administration Building for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago (1893).
"Ochre Court" (1888 - 1891) in Newport and the William K. Vanderbilt House (1881) in New York City are in the French château style; "The Breakers" (1892 - 1895), built for Cornelius Vanderbilt, and "Marble House" (1892), both in Newport, are in the Italian Renaissance style.
These houses were more homogeneous than Hunt's earlier designs.
For George Washington Vanderbilt he designed an enormous country estate, probably the largest in America, called "Biltmore" (1890 - 1895), near Asheville, North Carolina.
He sculpted the face of New York City, including designs for the facade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and many Fifth Avenue mansions now lost to the wrecking ball.
Hunt also founded both the American Institute of Architects and the Municipal Art Society.
Hew was an Honorary member of the Academie francaise.
Quotes from others about the person
Design critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times that Hunt was "American architecture's first, and in many ways its greatest, statesman. "
He married Catharine Clinton Howland in 1861.
She was the daughter of Samuel S. Howland.
