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Vermont judge, banker, and Congressman—both Wil-
liam Morris Hunt, one of the most talented American
artists of his generation, and Richard Morris Hunt, the
great architect were Leavitt Hunt’s brothers. After her
husband’s death in 1832, Mrs. Hunt moved the family
to Paris so her children could receive European educa-
tions. While his brothers studied art, architecture and
medicine in Paris, Hunt attended boarding school in
Switzerland, then took a law degree from the University
of Heidelberg in Germany, and in 1851, was enrolled
in the Swiss Military Academy in Thun. He was fl uent
in French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
and could read Farsi and Sanskrit, and he had traveled
throughout Europe, including Scandinavia and Russia.
Baker, an independently wealthy amateur sculptor from
Cincinnati, had been a student of Hiram Powers in Flor-
ence, and had been living in and traveling throughout
Europe since the early 1840s. He was an old friend the
Hunts, and when he told them of his plans to make an
extensive tour of the Orient in the winter of 1851/52,
Leavitt Hunt expressed an interest in joining him. They
rendezvoused in Florence, Italy, in late September/early
October 1851, spent the fi rst two weeks in November in
Rome practicing photography, then sailed from Naples
to Malta en route to Alexandria. For the next six months
Hunt and Baker traveled together in a journey that took
them up the Nile and into the Sinai; to Petra; to Jerusa-
lem; to present-day Lebanon; to Constantinople; and to
Athens, before they returned to Paris in May 1852.
Hunt and Baker’s photographs are mostly of the ma-
jor architectural monuments they encountered on this
tour: the Sphinx and pyramids at Giza; general views
and details of the temple complex at Karnak; elements
of the Ramesseum at Thebes; structures on the Island of
Philae (where they ended their trip up the Nile); build-
ings of the Monastery of St. Catherine’s at Mt. Sinai;
rock-cut temples and tombs at Petra; the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; ruins at Baalbek; and the
buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. The photographs,
unfortunately, do not offer a comprehensive record of
their journey: there are no images from Constantinople,
for example, although Baker wrote his sister that they
made a number of photographs there.
Hunt and Baker’s negatives measured approximately
18 × 24 cm and were made by the waxed-paper process.
Some of the images were made as personal works, but
most appear to have been collaborations. In making
their views, Hunt and Baker did not typically position
a human fi gure in the image to give a sense of scale,
but their photographs are carefully composed to balance
description with aesthetic appeal, and are of a consis-
tent technical quality that is indicative of a comfortable
familiarity with their materials. Among the sixty-odd
known images by them that survive, two are especially
noteworthy: a photograph of a ghawázi (a woman be-
longing to a caste of female dancers who performed
unveiled in public and could therefore be photographed)
that is signed in the negative by Hunt and is perhaps the
earliest camera portrait of a Middle Eastern woman; and
a view of the Parthenon that is notable simply because
it is of the less noble, therefore less photographed, rear
façade of this well-known classic building.
Hunt and Baker printed their negatives in Paris in June
and July 1852, making enough prints to assemble two
complete sets of images, with extra prints left over. Hunt
assembled one set into an album, which he kept. Baker
returned to the United States with the other set and left it
with an unidentifi ed print dealer in New York to test the
market. The negatives and remaining prints were divided
between Hunt and Baker, with Hunt apparently keeping
most of the prints. After showing his album to the King of
Prussia and presenting a portfolio of eleven prints to Karl
Richard Lepsius, the preeminent German Egyptologist of
the19th century, Hunt appears to have lost further interest
in promoting his and Baker’s achievement.
Neither Leavitt Hunt nor Nathan Flint Baker showed
any interest in photography after this. Baker returned
to Cincinnatti and pursued the life of an independently
wealthy gentleman. Leavitt Hunt completed his stud-
ies at the Swiss Military Academy, and returned to the
United States in 1855 to take a second law degree from
Harvard. He practiced law in New York until the Civil
War broke out, when he enlisted as a lieutenant in a New
York regiment; he served on General Heintzelman’s
staff, and was brevetted to the rank of Lieutenant
Colonel for gallantry at the Battle of Malvern Hill. In-
valided out of the service in 1862, Hunt returned to his
law practice in New York, but retired to Weatherfi eld,
Vermont in 1867, after his wife inherited her father’s
estate there. Hunt spent the remainder of his life as a
gentleman farmer, living in a house fi lled with the exotic
souvenirs of his travels.
Hunt and Baker’s photographs are both extremely
rare and seldom seen. Hunt’s personal album is now in
the collection of the Bennington Art Museum, Benning-
ton, Vermont. The set of prints Baker left in New York is
unaccounted for and presumed lost; however, some of
the negatives he kept recently surfaced and are now in
a private collection. The portfolio Hunt sent to Lepsius
is now in the collection of the Museum Ludwig/Agfa
Foto-Historama in Cologne, Germany. Any negatives
that Leavitt Hunt may have had are lost, but most the
prints he kept became the property of his brother Richard
Morris Hunt and most of them are now preserved in the
Richard Morris Hunt Papers, the American Architec-
tural Foundation, Washington, D.C. Any prints kept by
Hunt’s family were donated to the Library of Congress
years ago. Outside these holdings, the single prints in
the Hallmark Collection and at George Eastman House,
and the six prints in the Harrison D. Horblit Collection