Dennis Miller Bunker
Dennis Miller Bunker
1861 - 1890
American painter. He was a founder-member of the ‘Boston school’ of painters and was the first artist to bring the Impressionist style to New England. From c. 1878 to 1881 he studied with WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, and from 1881 he studied in Paris with JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME, returning to America in the autumn of 1885 to teach at the Cowles Art School in Boston. Although he held this post for only five years, he influenced many Bostonians (among them Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the Gardner Museum in Boston) to be more open to European ideas in art. After spending the summer of 1888 at Calcott, Salop, England, painting plein-air landscapes with JOHN SINGER SARGENT, who was working closely with Claude Monet at the time, he altered his style, his colours becoming brighter and his brushwork looser. However, he always maintained the careful drawing he had learnt from Gérôme. Bunker’s best-known works date from the last year or two of his life, such as Jessica (1890; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) and the Roadside Cottage: Medfield (1890; Duxbury, MA, A. Complex Mus.). Bunker, whom Sargent once called the most gifted young American, died at 29 of influenza, just a few years after his first solo exhibition. [Mark W. Sullivan. "Bunker, Dennis Miller." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T012275.]
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