The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division, with excerpts from the Richard Morris Hunt Research Guide.
How do you breathe life into a valuable but under-appreciated and complicated collection from the 1800s? The Prints & Photographs Division was fortunate to earn the attention of Sam Watters—an exceptional historian of art and architecture. The networks of people who influence culture interest Watters as much as the building styles. Watters recognized the entirety of the Richard Morris Hunt Collection as a hidden treasure. He looked carefully at all the Hunt Collection visual materials in the Library of Congress and devoted more than a decade to intensive research for the new book The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt.
Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) is best known for his Gilded Age mansions for such wealthy families as the Vanderbilts, but his impact on American culture after the Civil War ranges far beyond those lavish palaces. In this book, Watters reveals Hunt’s remarkable impact on creating the institutions and conventions that transformed Old World traditions into his generation’s idea of an American civilization, through architecture, interior design, sculpture, painting, and the advocacy of artisan trades. This dynamic biography follows the contours of American thought that shaped Hunt’s life and work among the ruling one percent.
More than 200 illustrations fill the book, including recent photographs by Michael Froio taken to convey the opulent details, the monumental scale, and the grand settings of Hunt’s surviving buildings. The modern photographs complement the black-and-white vintage photographs that are part of Hunt’s own collection as shown in the two images of Ochre Court (above), now the administration building at Salve Regina University.
The work of Richard Morris Hunt and his staff is remarkable for its breadth of building types and the professional standing of the clients, men and women of the arts, science, industry, and religion who commissioned projects as modest as carriage barns and as ambitious as university buildings and public libraries. The Lenox Library in New York City (shown at the top) was designed by Hunt in the early 1870s as a Gilded Age landmark and became a forerunner to the New York Public Library.
Watters is a generous scholar and educator. To encourage future research about the ways that architecture both shapes and reflects an era, he created a checklist of more than 245 buildings and sites designed by Richard Morris Hunt and his office from the 1850s to the 1890s. You can download a spreadsheet or a pdf file. The resources investigated by Watters in more than twenty libraries throughout the United States, France, and England are documented in detailed notes and an extensive bibliography. This information can be useful for any exploration of 19th century architecture and the Gilded Age.
Education was also very important to Richard Morris Hunt. After the Civil War, he called on his colleagues to create an “Architectural Library and Museum of Art” that could teach and inspire students with “models, casts, drawings, photographs, in fact everything referring to architecture and the cognate arts.” Among the activities he shared with his wife, Catharine Howland Hunt, was the assembly of numerous scrapbook volumes composed of thousands of clippings, organized by subject– a visual encyclopedia of Western fine arts.
The Hunt Collection at the Library of Congress consists of more than 15,000 drawings, photographs, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, rare books, and three-dimensional objects collected or created by Richard Morris Hunt from the 1840s until his death in 1895. Per the will of Catharine Hunt, the materials now in the Prints & Photographs Division were donated in 1926 to the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 2010 the AIA and the American Architectural Foundation donated the collection to us.
Watters’ new book and research notes have brought coherence to the Hunt Collection by emphasizing how these disparate materials were originally part of Hunt’s vision for an “Architectural Library and Museum of Art.” I also appreciate the expertise of the many Library colleagues who contributed to this special collaboration by making the vast Hunt Collection available in person, inventorying the book library, creating more than 1,000 digital images, conserving original items, and editing and publishing the book. A research interest became an impressive achievement in reviving a collection and making it accessible worldwide through a book, a research guide, and a forthcoming exhibit at Newport Mansions.
Learn More:
- Read the book The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt: Architecture and Art for an American Civilization. By Sam Watters. D. Giles in association with the Library of Congress, 2024.
- Enjoy the essays “A Gilded Life,” by Susan Reyburn and “Last Word” by Sam Watters in Library of Congress Magazine 13 (Sept.-Oct. 2024): 12-17 and 28-29.
- View more than 1,400 selected drawings, photographs, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, and art objects in the Hunt Collection through the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog,
- Explore the Richard Morris Hunt Research Guide. By Mari Nakahara and Sam Watters, 2024. Includes a list of more than 245 buildings designed by Hunt and his office.
- Browse this research guide to find many other resources in the Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collections at the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
- Watch for an exhibition of Hunt’s work at Newport Mansions by the Preservation Society of Newport County from May 30 to November 5, 2025.