Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a similar group on his return to America.

[2] Having been denied the opportunity to paint and draw by an overbearing father, Jane Leavitt Hunt resolved that her children would be given the chance to study the arts in the best academies—even if it meant moving to Europe to attend them.

"From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work," writes historian David McCullough.

The power of Mr. Hunt was ... felt in directing a large number of young art-students to visit Paris, and eventually also Munich, at each of which the tendency has been for some years toward bolder methods in the technics of art.

The result has been to introduce to [America] a truer perception of the vital importance of style in the present stage of our art, and to emphasize the truth that he who has anything to say will make it much more effective if he knows how to give it adequate utterance.

Such works include The Belated Kid, Girl at the Fountain, Hurdy-Gurdy Boy, and others – but the public called for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit for Hunt; among his best paintings of this genre are those of William M. Evarts, Mrs. Charles Francis Adams, the Rev.

James Freeman Clarke, Senator Charles Sumner, William H. Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray.

[10][2] Many of Hunt's paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Hunt is widely credited for having influenced the styles of Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam and John Joseph Enneking.

Hunt's signature lively brushwork, partly derived from study of contemporary European painting, marked a new phase in 'oil sketching' that was carried on by Homer and others.

"[15] In a bit of art history revisionism, some scholars are now re-examining Hunt's powerful pull on other early New England artists, many better-known.

The Boston philosopher and author William James studied with Hunt for a time, before turning away from painting to concentrate on his writing.

Following Hunt's death, his Harvard classmates and other Bostonians contributed to a fund to purchase many of his paintings and donate them to the Museum of Fine Arts.

[25] Aside from the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Athenaeum has a number of the artist's works in its collection, a gift of William Morris Hunt II.

In accordance with a long expressed desire, William Morris Hunt was buried at Prospect Hill cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont, beside other family members.