Lady at a Fence

The woman in profile in Dennis Miller Bunker’s Lady at a Fence stands against a rustic fence and turns her head away from the viewer. One hand to her chin, she appears to gaze into the distance beyond the left edge of the image. Her facial features are barely visible, but the woman’s fashionably tight-fitting dress suggests urban sophistication, in contrast with her rural surroundings. Bunker lavished particular attention on the folds and gathers of the dress. He used series of hatched graphite lines to suggest the contours of the woman’s form, which is distinctly outlined, and he blended the medium for deeper shadows on the ground and the undersides of the fence rails.

The sheet bearing this sketch was originally a leaf in a sketchbook in which sheets were bound along the short edge; the artist turned it vertically to accommodate the figure, probably sketching outdoors directly from his posed model. Bunker’s artistic inclinations were evident from boyhood, and in 1876, the year he made Lady at a Fence, the fifteen-year-old began his formal artistic training at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design, in his native New York. The inscription at the lower left corner of the sheet no doubt refers to the Art Students League. Such an informal, outdoor sketch would not have been made in school, where beginning students worked in the studio drawing from casts of ancient statuary. Rather, Bunker may have intended to offer his sketch to the League’s instructors as a prospective student, as evidence of his artistic abilities. Carefully worked, it displays an ambitious command of the figure within the landscape. The limitations of Bunker’s self-taught technique is betrayed in the awkward anatomy of the woman’s left arm, which must reach across her back for her left hand to rest atop the fence rail.

Although the figure in the landscape did not emerge as a distinct theme in Bunker’s work, the portrayal of the figure itself became a financial mainstay of the artist’s brief career. Lady at a Fence, one of his earliest known drawings, anticipates his three-quarter-length portraits and studies of models, notably The Mirror (TF. 1999.22), in which Bunker explored the grace and elegance of the female form in contemporary dress.

Dennis Miller Bunker (1861–1890) Rediscovered, New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut (organizer). Venue: New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut, April 1–May 7, 1978; Davis & Long Gallery, New York, New York, June 7–June 30, 1978. [exh. cat.]