Having spent more than a decade in Europe—studying sculpture with Henry Kirke Brown in Rome, attending the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, and adopting the simple style of the Barbizon School in France, by the autumn of 1856 William Morris Hunt settled in Newport where he established himself as a society portrait painter and teacher. Among his students was John La Farge, who in 1859 had just returned to the United States from his own European sojourn. While in Paris, La Farge studied briefly in the atelier of the painter Couture, and though he was not particularly satisfied with Couture’s working method, upon his return, he was drawn to Hunt, a fellow former pupil of Couture’s. “But a disappointment was in store for me,” La Farge wrote in his memoir, “and it was this,—that Hunt had abandoned the practice of Couture, which was what I wished to continue…. But his general influence was so good, and the pleasure of devoting almost all my time to painting as a task under a teacher, kept me satisfied with my momentary position. And there was always something to learn from a new man whom I liked, to learn or to share with him, for we found more and more common admirations.” La Farge was to become one of the most acclaimed landscape painters and stained glass artists of the late nineteenth century. Yet, almost twenty years after his studies with Hunt, La Farge turned to his mentor for inspiration once again. In 1876, La Farge was commissioned to create a cycle of mural and stained glass designs for Trinity Church in Boston, and as Royal Cortissoz has noted, “American mural decoration was then in the process of being born, the only contemporary of La Farge’s making any serious contribution to it being his old friend William Hunt, who, at just about that time, was to do his interesting work in the Capitol at Albany.”