Dennis Miller Bunker
Garden City, New York, 1861 - 1890, Boston
Bunker first exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design in 1880; for the next two years he showed frequently there and at the Society of American Artists, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Boston Art Club. Bunker's early pictures are devoted primarily to nostalgic images of beached boats such as Saltmarsh Landscape with Two Children Near a Beached Sailboat and Dory (1881, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), paintings that were quickly sold and for which he began to receive favorable critical attention.
Like most young artists of his generation, however, Bunker felt compelled to travel to Paris to complete his education. He left New York late in September 1882 to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the most prestigious art school of the late nineteenth century. Bunker studied at the École for two years under the instruction of Jean-Léon Gérôme and perfected his ability to draw and to paint the human figure. During the summers, Bunker, usually in the company of fellow American art students Kenneth Cranford and Charles Platt, painted landscapes in the French countryside, working in Lacroix-St. Ouen (Oise) in 1883 and in Larmor (Brittany) in 1884.
Bunker returned to New York in the fall of 1884, taking a studio at 140 West Fifty-fifth Street. That winter he completed his figural composition A Bohemian (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), for which he received the prestigious Hallgarten prize at the National Academy of Design's 1885 exhibition. Bunker was elected to the Society of American Artists that spring, and in the fall he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to accept a position as chief instructor of painting at the newly formed Cowles Art School. Bunker, now living above the school at 145 Dartmouth Street, had his first solo exhibition at the Noyes and Blakeslee Gallery in Boston in late October 1885. In November he became a member of the St. Botolph Club and the Tavern Club, two Boston institutions that fostered friendships among the city's leading artists, musicians, and patrons.
Bunker continued his habit of painting one major figural composition during the winter months, completing the mysterious A Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins (Simmons College) in 1885-1886 and the ethereal Portrait of Anne Page (private collection) in 1886-1887. During the summer he proceeded with his exploration of rural landscape subjects, working in South Woodstock, Connecticut, with painter Abbott Thayer in 1886 and in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with Charles Platt in 1887. During the fall of 1887, either through his connections at the Tavern Club or his friendships with the art collectors Isabella Stewart Gardner and Sarah Choate Sears, Bunker met John Singer Sargent, who traveled to Boston in November during his first working visit to America. Sargent and Bunker became close friends and spent the summer of 1888 painting together in Calcot Mill, near London.
During his time with Sargent, Bunker faced the challenge that the spontaneity of the new impressionist style posed against the strict standards of his academic training. Perhaps unwilling to reconcile the two, Bunker now divided his painting method, using a loosely brushed, brightly colored technique for his landscapes and a darker, more tightly rendered approach for portraits. His first extant impressionist picture, Chrysanthemums (1888, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), representing the floral display in Gardner's Brookline greenhouse, is among the earliest paintings in the impressionist style to be crafted in the United States by an American artist. Bunker continued experimenting with the modern French style during the summers of 1889 and 1890 in Medfield, Massachusetts, where he created a series of meadow views. These were exhibited, along with Sargent's impressionist figure studies, to mixed reviews in Boston and New York; the critic for the Boston Transcript described them as "interesting freaks of painting [that] may be classified as bold and original experiments" (28 Jan. 1890).
In October 1889 Bunker moved to New York, taking rooms at 3 North Washington Square. He concentrated on figure painting during the 1889-1890 winter season, creating two pictures of women, Jessica (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and The Mirror (Terra Museum of American Art), that relate to the aristocratic and ethereal figure pieces of his friend and neighbor Thomas Wilmer Dewing. As Bunker explained to his fiancée, "[I] strive to work towards something distinguished that goes by the name of Beauty." The Mirror won several prizes at various exhibitions over the following months. After a year's engagement, Bunker married Eleanor Hardy, the daughter of a prominent Boston businessman, in October 1890, and the couple settled into rooms at the Sherwood Studio Building in New York. Bunker died unexpectedly three months later from meningitis during a Christmas visit to Boston; he was twenty-nine years old. His friends the painter and designer Charles Platt and the architect Stanford White organized a memorial exhibition of Bunker's work at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in January 1891. White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, also a friend of Bunker's, later collaborated on the design of Bunker's tombstone.
Bibliography
Bunker's surviving papers are held by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; they include both scattered early correspondence and letters to Eleanor Hardy, an intimate and complete record of Bunker's last year. Correspondence between Bunker and Isabella Stewart Gardner is in the collection of the archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Published sources include R. H. Ives Gammell, Dennis Miller Bunker (1953); the exhibition catalog prepared by Charles B. Ferguson for the New Britain Museum of American Art, Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) Rediscovered (1978); Jared I. Edwards, "Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) Rediscovered," Nineteenth Century 4 (Spring 1978): 70-75; and Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist (1994), which includes a complete bibliography and a checklist of Bunker's extant work.
Erica E. Hirshler
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Citation:
Erica E. Hirshler. "Bunker, Dennis Miller";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-01560.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 12:27:16 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
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