Richard Morris Hunt

Richard Morris Hunt

Karl Theodore Bitter

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bitter and the architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) collaborated on the execution of some of the most lavishly decorated American buildings of the early 1890s. After the completion of the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, owner William K. Vanderbilt commissioned Bitter to carve marble relief portraits of Hunt and Jules Hardouin-Mansart who had designed Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, a nod to the great French tradition in which Hunt worked. This cast was produced in bronze in 1892, presumably from the original plaster model (1891; Art Institute of Chicago) and descended in the Hunt family.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.