WASHINGTON, DC.- Celebrated internationally in the 19th century as America’s premier architect, Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) is best known for his opulent Gilded Age Vanderbilt mansions, including Biltmore, the Breakers, Marble House, and other landmark works.
Yet the impact of Hunt on American culture after the Civil War ranges far beyond his lavish palaces. In “The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt,” historian Sam Watters reveals the architect’s remarkable influence in creating the institutions (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and their conventions that transformed Old World traditions into his generation’s idea of an American civilization, through architecture, interior design, sculpture, painting, and the ardent advocacy of artisan trades.
Hunt’s collection is held by the Library of Congress. A new Research Guide and more than 1,500 rights-free images are now online from the Richard Morris Hunt Collection in the Prints & Photographs Division.
CNN journalist Anderson Cooper hails the new book as “a fascinating and important account of the life and architectural genius of Richard Morris Hunt,” and award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns praises it as a “thoughtful, complex, and startlingly haunting memorial . . . a crucial and in many ways definitive account of the master builder of America in its ascendent age.”
The first American to study at the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Hunt cultivated a trans-Atlantic network of wealthy, influential men and women during a period of class revolution. Feeling their establishment values and industrial fortunes threatened by the laboring, immigrant poor – and driven by a moral obligation to instruct the “masses” in what was beautiful, true and good – Hunt’s society concurred on what was needed to define, protect and perpetuate their ideas of a civil society. To this end and to instill the Eurocentric mores required for global acceptance and dominance, they conceived and built museums, libraries, skyscrapers, apartment houses, and the residential castle.
Watters repositions Hunt and his 40-year career in light of new discoveries and connections made through his meticulous study of the Richard Morris Hunt Collection at the Library of Congress and other institutions. Featuring 200 illustrations, including Hunt’s drawings, images he collected, portraits of his privileged New York and Newport inner circle, and new photographs and plans, this dynamic biography follows the contours of American thought that shaped Hunt’s life and work among the ruling one percent.
“The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt: Architecture and Art for an American Civilization” is available in hardcover ($54.95) from booksellers worldwide and from the Library of Congress Shop
