The iconic American architect of the Gilded Age, Richard Morris Hunt, created so much of the nation’s high-brow cultural idea of itself that it’s now hard to imagine the country without it.
He designed estates for the fabulously wealthy, houses that still have their own names — Biltmore, The Breakers, Marble House. In New York, he was the architect for the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue, the façade and the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. In Chicago, he designed the Marshall Field mansion and the administration building for the World’s Columbian Exhibition.
Hunt and his wife Catharine, spent six decades assembling a collection that eventually included more than 15,000 items — books, papers, drawings, photographs, scrapbooks. That collection, now preserved at the Library, was always intended to be a national resource.
“He collects all this and puts it together because he wants to build this museum,” says Sam Watters, author of “The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt,” in a new Library video. “You have this intact collection that’s intended to educate people … that’s what makes it so rare. His collection was conceived to become a permanent public educational force, and that’s what’s at the Library of Congress today.”
Watters’ book on Hunt was published with the Library last year, and the Library’s collections are being used this summer and fall in an exhibit at Rosecliff, one of the mansions of the era in Newport, Rhode Island, where Hunt designed several palatial estates. The exhibit, “Richard Morris Hunt: In a New Light,” for the first time will bring together items from the Library, the National Portrait Gallery and the Preservation Society of Newport County to give visitors an intimate look into his bygone world.
Hunt was born in 1827 into a wealthy and influential Vermont family and was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After he returned home in 1855, he helped work on the expanding U.S. Capitol Building and quickly elevated the nation’s architectural pursuits from the workaday world of the craftsman into professional visionaries of the building trades. He was instrumental in founding the American Institute of Architects and served as its president. He died in 1895.
The Library has digitized about 1,500 images from his papers; there’s also a research guide, outlining his work and history.
“I can’t imagine another collection that’s a better view into the world of the 19th century, where the country needed to go at a time when it was reimagining its future after the difficult years of the Civil War,” says Watters.
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