Dennis Miller Bunker
American
1861-1890
Dennis Miller Bunker wrote ironically to a friend:
“It is a mistake to have only one life. As for me, I am only rehearsing in this one—I might be a painter if I could live again and begin afresh. We ought to be given three tries, like the baseball men.”
Dennis Bunker was out for a walk one night with some friends, and had been complaining of a fever and sickness. Three days later he was dead from Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis. He was 28 years old.
I can’t help but wondering what he might have done with his life if he had been given more time on Earth.
When Bunker was just 15 he began to study art at the Art Students League in New York. Before he was 20, he was exhibiting in National exhibits. When he was 21 he went to Paris to study with Jean Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Art. When Bunker was 25 he accepted a teaching position at the Cowles School of Art in Boston. When he was 27 he met and married Eleanor Hardy and moved to New York. While he was returning to Boston to celebrate Christmas in 1890, he fell ill and died on Dec. 28th.
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Bunker had become close, personal friends with John Singer Sargent while they were both in Paris, and they summered and painted together in England. He was also close friends with a group of painters known as the American Impressionists a few years later. But, where Sargent fused many of the ideals of the Realists with the Impressionists, Bunker painted both styles completely separate.
Bunker painted tight academic portraits in somber colors. He also painted loose Impressionistic landscapes that were very bright and colorful and used broken-color ( an effect popular with the Impressionists, but despised by the Realists). Yet, he never mixed the two styles; This is interesting in his work! It is difficult enough for an artist to learn to paint in one method, let alone two that are completely different. Bunker painted in two distinct and very different styles, equally well.
Bunker was almost entirely forgotten by the public shortly after his death, but his family and friends, students and colleagues continued to hold a great love and respect for him. In 1891, a year after his death, a retrospective exhibition of his work was organized and held at the St. Botolph Club in Boston, MA.
Bunker is generally acknowledged as being the founder of the “Boston School” of art, though he was never aware at having done so.