Dennis Miller Bunker

The tremendous promise of Dennis Miller Bunker’s career was tragically cut short by his death at age twenty-nine.  As a teenager, Bunker enrolled at New York’s National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, where he studied under the renowned instructor William Merritt Chase. As did many of his contemporaries, Bunker traveled to Paris for additional artistic training, gaining admittance to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). Bunker returned to New York at the end of 1884, after two years in Paris. The following year, he became the chief instructor of drawing and painting, artistic anatomy, and composition at the Cowles Art School in Boston.

Introduced to John Singer Sargent by the Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner, the handsome young artist developed a close friendship with the expatriate American artist in the fall of 1887. Although Bunker considered aesthetic art champion Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921), also a former student of Gérôme, to have been his greatest influence, it was Sargent and his engagement with impressionism that affected Bunker’s work during the final two years of his life. In the 1880s Bunker refined his personal artistic vision. His approach to landscape evolved from the alluring soft, monochromatic tonalism of the French Barbizon school to the high-keyed palette and broken brushwork of the more modern French impressionism. Bunker inspired other American artists to experiment with this radical interpretation of nature.