Richard Morris Hunt’s book and photograph collections reflect his literary and visual erudition. Having been raised in a New England society of book collectors who read ancient and modern languages, and then living in Europe among bibliophiles, Hunt began in his late teens to purchase from auctions and dealers architectural treatises related to his training at the École des Beaux-Arts and later to his museum. Among his most prized purchases, dating from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, were editions of Vitruvius Pollio, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, and Philibert de l’Orme.
For his architectural practice, Hunt acquired journals and pamphlets relating to construction and engineering, as well as contemporary writings by Victor Baltard, Eugène E. Viollet-le-Duc, César Daly, and Augustus Pugin. Any assessment of Hunt’s collection must consider works he did not acquire including texts by Henri Labrouste and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, preferring multiple volumes by the academician Quatremère de Quincy.
Richard Morris Hunt and his generation viewed architecture as one among interrelated arts. A collector, museum trustee, and designer of buildings and lavish interiors, he collected books on the applied arts by Alexandre du Sommerard, the decorative arts by Édouard Williamson and Georg G. Ungewitter, the fine arts by Hipppolyte le Bas and Julius Lessing, and costumes by Émile Prisse d’Avennes and Camille Bonnard.
The extent of Richard Morris Hunt’s library during his lifetime is known through an 1857 New-York Evening Post interview with the then twenty-nine-year-old architect, reprinted in James Wynne, Private Libraries of New York (1860). Wynne marveled at Hunt’s library of architectural, art, and related books, described as having three to four thousand volumes, “chiefly collected in Paris” and of “about five thousand photographs.” For this, see The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt (2024), 57.
After her husband’s death in 1895, Catharine Hunt, assisted by artist and restorer Janet L. Cook, inventoried the books and photographs of Richard Morris Hunt. From this work they produced four typescript catalogs titled the Library of Richard Morris Hunt, three of which relate to Hunt’s book collection, the fourth being a broad cataloging of his photographs. For the history of this cataloging, see The Gilded Life, 267, 299 note 9 and the extended note.
On the closing of the architecture office of Hunt and Hunt after the death of Joseph H. Hunt in 1924, the Hunt family, per the will of Catharine Hunt, transferred to the AIA in 1926 the books and photographs listed in the Library of Richard Morris Hunt, as well as other publications, some of which were owned by Richard Morris Hunt. In 2010 the AIA transferred these materials to the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
The subsequent Library of Congress inventory of the Hunt collections revealed the following.
Excluding serials, journals, magazines, periodicals, and books published after 1895, about 1,000 monographs are represented by unique entries in the typescript catalogs. Additionally, there are approximately 250 publications dated before 1896 but not in the catalogs (potential ownership by Richard Morris Hunt), and another 250 publications that came with the Hunt gift with no indication that they had belonged to Richard Morris Hunt (books published after 1895). Overall, the Hunt Collection at the Library of Congress has an estimated 1,500 monographs.
From the fact that the catalogs include a small number of publications after 1895 and that some books have inscriptions establishing their ownership by Catharine H. and Richard H. Hunt, we know that not all the works listed in the typescript catalogs were owned by Richard Morris Hunt.
Whether Richard Hunt’s personal library once had three to four thousand volumes is not known. But we know the library, renowned in the period, was reduced in size through various ways including:
Image shows open book, with sketches on left page, and engraving "edura di Strada Maggiore ... Bologna" on right page.
