William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), American painter, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, and educated at Harvard University. He studied with the French academic painter Thomas Couture in Paris, where he made friends with and was influenced by the French landscape and genre painter of the Barbizon school, Jean François Millet. In 1855 Hunt returned to the United States and later opened an art school in Boston. He introduced the Barbizon school practice of painting in the open air and was instrumental in establishing the vogue, still followed by many Americans, of studying art in Paris. Hunt became a fashionable portrait painter, his sitters including such notables as Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His importance to American painting, however, lay chiefly in his application of new French methods to landscape—as, for example, in Bathers (1877, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts) and American Falls (1878, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.).