Dennis Miller Bunker: Unity of Effect

"Wild Asters" by Dennis Miller Bunker

R.H. Ives Gammell continues the story of Dennis Miller Bunker by analyzing his artistic achievements. In a chapter on "Landscapes" he writes: 

"Dennis Bunker painted his finest landscapes at Medfield during the summers of 1889 and 1890, summers which were to be his last. There he found material peculiarly congenial to his talent in the brook-crossed meadow, a stone's throw from his boarding house. He describes it affectionately as 'a funny charming little place, about as big as a pocket handkerchief with a tiny river, tiny willows and a tiny brook.'

"His way of painting there seems to have been to lay in first the larger masses of color on his canvas. In so doing he established once and for all the general tonality of his picture, pitching it in a key which allowed for sufficient luminosity while avoiding the chalky and insubstantial look which so often mars the work of plein air painters. Bunker's unerring judgment in this matter of key is one of the main factors in the success of his landscapes. Once the larger masses were properly established and the canvas covered, he would proceed to work into these areas with broad touches of color. As the pictures progressed these touches naturally became smaller until, in the more finished canvases, the workmanship bore some resemblance to the pointilliste technique of the French.

People untrained in the art of painting often believe that finish is attained by simply adding detail to detail and consequently they dismiss it as a mere by-product of industry and patience. Unfortunately this view does not correspond with the truth. For an essential characteristic of all fine painting is unity of effect, and this unity is destroyed by any detail stated in a false relation to the other component parts of the picture. This is particularly true of the type of painting we are here discussing, the purpose of which is to recreate on canvas the impression made on the painter's eye by the landscape before him. To achieve this end, each detail must be set down with just the degree of definition and coloration which it holds for the eye when the focus of vision is adjusted so as to include the entire scene depicted. Piecemeal notation of individual detail immediately destroys the requisite unity of impression and turns the canvas into a compilation of separately observed visual facts. This invariably results in a hard, dry look, destroying all breadth of effect and offensive even to those who are quite unaware of its technical cause... The ability to carry a picture to a high degree of finish without losing its unity of impression is the mark of a master and requires artistry of the highest order."

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Unexpected Demise

"Portrait of Eleanor Hardy Bunker"
by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis and Eleanor Bunker went directly to New York after the wedding, settling in a studio in the Sherwood Building, on the corner of 57th Street and 6th Avenue. The weeks that followed were truly happy ones. They prepared their meals in the studio or went out to eat at restaurants. Their artist friends gave them a hearty welcome. And, as always, Dennis Bunker painted, this time using his beautiful bride as a model. It was during these weeks that he made the fine study of her owned by the Metropolitan Art Museum and started a larger canvas, of which a superbly indicated head remains as a fragment. He also started work on sketches for four decorative medallions ordered by Stanford White for a ceiling in the house of Mr. Whitelaw Reid.

The young couple returned to Boston for a Christmas visit at the Hardy's. The day after Christmas Dennis Bunker was taken ill and the doctor diagnosed influenza. He died early on the morning of December 28th.

The tragedy of this sudden death, ending a career which had promised such high achievement, was deeply felt by all his friends, as well as by the larger circle who knew only the painter's work. A letter written by William Dean Howells to Mrs. Bunker perhaps most adequately conveys the sorrow of those who had been associated with her husband.

'We know we cannot help your grief but we know from our own heartbreak that we shall not hurt it by trying to tell you how truly we sorrow with you. Your husband was our very dear and honored friend and at one time he came and went in our house almost like one of ourselves. We loved him for the goodness we felt in him as much as we admired him for his rare and beautiful gift. I shall never forget the noble seriousness with which he once talked to me of death, as something he had not been afraid to face in his thoughts; and now that he has gone where we shall all follow he has left us the precious meaning of a life full of gentle and patient courage.'

Dennis Bunker seems to have had a premonition of his limited time on earth for he wrote in an earlier letter to Eleanor: '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.' But he was wrong in his estimate of his achievement as a painter. A painter he was and in his brief life he attained a permanent place in American painting."

To be continued

(From "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Daunted

"The Mirror" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker was back at Medfield, once more at Miss Sewall's boarding house, and very happy to be back. He wrote that he was painting for the first time in nearly two months, but had given up reading to save his eyes. He feels that Medfield is his own element and he adds, 'I see a thousand things to paint at once...after that other place,' alluding to Cornish.

But the summer was not happy like the previous one. Loeffler was not there with him and he found his only companionship among the local farmers, with who he got on famously. The eye trouble, though not serious, was annoying for a man whom painting and reading were absorbing passions. The headaches recurred to torture him from time to time. And as his wedding day approached, he was haunted by the old doubts as to the wisdom of allowing the girl he adored to share his shabby existence.

A letter to Miss Hardy betrays the overwrought state of the artist's nerves. It is of exceptional interest for what it tells us of his aesthetic creed and of his intimate attitude towards the art of painting.

'You must try and realize how dull and monotonous an artist's life is. There is absolutely nothing but work, work, work... What I am trying to tell you is not to nourish any ideas of an artist people whom you see may expound to you. Don't think, as they do, that the charm of an artist's work must be found also in his own personality. It is always apart, or should be, should have nothing to do with it, and that is what makes it such an infernal trade. Never to play on one's own twopenny flute but to keep the big end in view always; to remain patient and cold and quiet and work like a dog from morning 'til night; there is no other way of arriving even at talent, unless one is cut out of larger stuff than I am.'

The wedding took place on October 2nd, at Emmanuel Church in Boston, an unconventional affair but with many friends in attendance."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: New York

"Jessica" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"In the time running up to his marriage with Eleanor Hardy, Dennis Miller Bunker went to New York, planning eventually to take her to live in that city. He settled in a studio near one occupied by his friend Charles Platt. In New York he found such men as Thomas Dewing, H.O. Walker, William M. Chase, Stanford White, St. Gaudens, Alfred Q. Collins and Frank Millet. Sargent was a prominent figure in the city that winter and Loeffler a frequent visitor. The Player's Club filled the place in Bunker's life which in Boston had been taken by the Tavern. 

Bunker had become established as a portrait painter in Boston and had been able to put aside a fair sum on money. In all probability he believed that he would soon have others to execute in New York, but the gamble was injudicious. He did not succeed in getting commissions during that winter and he necessarily drew upon the saving of previous years in order to live. He painted from professional models, a procedure which, when the models are satisfactory, often enables a painter to do his best work. The results in this case were 'Jessica' and 'The Mirror.' But the artist's bank account became sadly depleted.

Like many another artist, before and since, he feared that his constant preoccupation with painting would not be understood by his future wife, that it was perhaps hardly fair to ask any woman to share a life already dedicated to art. He wrote Eleanor:

'Do you know what it is to live with a painter? Of course you don't! Do you see me getting up at two in the morning with a candle to look at my picture or rising at six to play on the piano, as I did yesterday, in a dressing gown, with my eyes half open or sitting up all night to fight over something that will seem to you of no importance? Will you care for the species of chimpanzee that we suspect of great talent? Will you feel the pang and the weeks of distress that come when you paint a poor thing? Will you be able to stand the conceit and absurd and idiotic talk when we've done a good morsel of painting? ...Are you to see me rude to all sorts of swagger people and afraid of the wash-woman?'

In early spring his eyes bothered him and for a time he had to give up painting for a time. In June he went on a yachting trip with friends, then visited Cornish, New Hampshire, with Charles Platt," but was ready to return to Medfield to resume painting that summer.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Eleanor Hardy

"Eleanor Hardy Bunker" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker met Eleanor Hardy late in the spring of 1889 and fell in love with her immediately. Never was there a more perfect example of love at first sight. The young girl, then nineteen years old, was strikingly beautiful. Her tall figure and nobly chiseled features were enhanced by a radiant mass of sun-colored hair, the strands of which seemed to have been spun out of various golds. Her interests were not those of the conventional Boston girl of her day and she cared little for the pleasures of fashionable society. The two young people found that besides being deeply in love they had interests and ideals in common as well as kindred tastes in music and in literature. 

It was characteristic of Bunker that the realization of how much he was in love provoked in him a decision never to see Miss Hardy again. He felt his poverty very keenly. The mere thought of imposing his restricted way of life on a young girl inured to security was unendurable to him. Furthermore, being fully conscious, perhaps unduly so, of the somber side of his own nature, he was reluctant to impose his melancholy moods on the only being capable of alleviating them.

But the scruples of his conscience were not to prevail. Although he had announced that he was not to see her again, a freak of chance was enough to prove the futility of his grim determination. For one spring afternoon, Miss Hardy, happening to sit in one of the horse cars which provided public transportation in those days, her conveyance came to a stop by the side of a stationary car headed in the opposite direction. In this second car sat Dennis Bunker. An instant later he had changed cars and the two were deep in conversation. Unmistakably further struggle would be of no avail.

In the autumn they made known their plans to Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, who received the news with considerable surprise, as their prospective son-in-law was a man quite unknown to them. The wedding took place on October 2nd of the following year at Emmanuel Church in Boston. It was an unconventional wedding. There were no engraved invitations, no bridesmaids, no bridal bouquet. The guests had been invited by personal notes or by word of mouth. Bunker's friend Loeffler was best man. Most of Bunker's old friends managed to be there: John Sargent, Charles Platt, Alfred Q. Collins, Appleton Brown and many others."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

 

Dennis Miller Bunker: John Sargent, Pt. 2

"Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot" by J.S. Sargent

"It was inevitable that John Sargent and Dennis Bunker, once they were thrown together, should become close friends. Both were completely absorbed by the art of painting and each admired the talent of the other. But, in addition to this, the two painters had a common bond in their devotion to literature and music. Sargent's cosmopolitan culture could not but be fascinating to a young man, and Sargent became deeply attached to Bunker. Thirty years later, in a conversation with Clayton Johns he told the latter he could remember no one whom he had held in greater affection.

And so Dennis Miller Bunker's summer plans for 1888 resolved themselves into a trip to England, short visits to London, and some weeks spent with the Sargents at Calcot. Writing to Mrs. Gardner he described life there. 

'Sargent 'fils' is working away at all sort of things and making experiments without number. He makes them look awfully well - the experiments I mean - and is altogether a wonderful being.' Again, with a reference to his own laborious days, he continues, 'I hasten to add that I have other occupations such, for instance, as lawn-tennis which we play vigorously every evening and which causes us to nod about the drawing-room, while John plays Tristan and Isolde - or the Gotterdammerung.' 

This is a brief glimpse into the English visit, but it is sufficiently vivid to give a clear idea of what the summer must have been."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.) 

Dennis Miller Bunker: John Singer Sargent, Pt. 1

"Dennis Miller Bunker" by J.S. Sargent

"For the summer of 1888 Dennis Miller Bunker planned a trip abroad with John Sargent. Their original scheme included a visit to Italy but, due to the illness of Sargent's father, it was decided they should spend some weeks in England, at Calcot, near Reading.

I can find no indication of where Bunker and Sargent first met. It seems unlikely that their paths had crossed in Paris, although Sargent was living there at the time Bunker was at Gerome's atelier. But Sargent, five years older than Bunker, was already a brilliant figure in the Parisian world, while Bunker was still an obscure and very impecunious art student. It is more probably that the meeting took place in Boston, where Sargent spent several months painting portraits during the winter of 1887-88. It was certainly there that their friendship developed. The two painters doubtless saw each other at the Tavern and the St. Botolph clubs and met frequently at various Boston houses, notably at the Fairchilds' and at Mrs. John L. Gardner's.

In those days this great lady received her friends during the winter months at her home at 152 Beacon Street, moving out to her Brookline estate, Green Hill, for the spring and fall. To these houses came all that was most notable in the artistic and social life of Boston, as well as the most eminent visitors to the city. It was presumably during this winter of 1887-88 that Bunker became a member of her intimate circle, as the earliest letter of his preserved at Fenway Court is dated January, 1888. He was to find in Mrs. Gardner a devoted and understanding friend, as well as a discriminating patron for his art."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Ill Health

"Kenneth R. Cranford" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"The summer of 1887 took Dennis Miller Bunker to Newburyport. Here he had as companions Henry Walker and his old friend Charles Platt, 'le vieux Platt [the old Platt],' as he affectionately called him. He liked the country and he liked the company of his friends. But it was not a happy summer, for he was not well.

He wrote to his friend Joe Evans: 'As to me, it goes not at all. I do not work and don't feel as if such a thing would ever be possible.' 'God is pleased to afflict me with poverty and many adversities.' 'Figure to yourself one racked with pains and doubts and with an indefinable fear of the future and you have a striking portrait of your friend.' 'I am mostly occupied with cramps and such.'

The letters of this summer are never free from such comments. It would be impossible to arrive at any understanding of Bunker's attitude toward life without a full realization of the extent to which he was tortured by ill health. His own outward appearance did not suggest this to his friends. The melancholy, often verging on despair, to which he was so frequently subject, was unquestionably intensified by his physical condition. And the constantly recurring headaches and bouts of indigestion sadly interfered with his enjoyment of the opportunities that were open to him. 

It is all the more remarkable that many of his less intimate friends thought of him as a high-spirited and entertaining companion, the Gay Troubadour, as they sometimes called him. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the complete absence in his work of any suggestion of fatigue or moodiness. Serenity and unhurried workmanship are among the characteristic traits of Bunker's art."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Abbott Thayer

"The Brook at Medfield" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"During this period of his life, Dennis Miller Bunker came nearest to happiness in the summer months. The first of these summers, that of 1886, he spent at South Woodstock, Connecticut, with Abbott Thayer. Bunker had been acquainted with Abbott Thayer for some years, having met him once or twice before going to Paris. From the first he deeply admired both the art and the personality of the older man and considered him the greatest figure in American painting. He was therefore very happy to renew and strengthen his ties with him, when he passed through Boston. 

He wrote to Joe Evans, who was himself a personal friend of Thayer's: 'Thayer is certainly one of the kindest men I know but I can't help feeling utterly insufficient when he's talking. One should be enormously intelligent just to listen to such a man.' And a few days later: 'Thayer wants me to go to Woodstock with him, and by my faith I don't know why I shouldn't.'

To South Woodstock he went and the months that followed were happy ones. The country itself he found thoroughly to his taste and Abbott Thayer entertained and fascinated him. Thayer exerted a very marked influence on Bunker's art, an influence which seemed to increase as Bunker grew older. 

Perhaps this companionship helped him arrive at a fuller realization of his own aims as an artist. He wrote Ann Page: 

'I think at last I am beginning to be glad that I am a painter. I begin to stop asking myself, at least, why I am one and recognize my right to make pictures. I begin to see that the love, the simple love of the beautiful things of nature, the way things look, is enough to give anyone the right to be a painter and, as I think it now, it seems to be the secret and keynote of the whole thing. But one must love something else or, be he ever so skillful with paint, he will just miss the charm. I have said this to myself for a good many years, but I never have felt it so strongly as I do now - I have never been so content to be a painter and nothing else. I begin to feel so strongly that one's own approbation is the only reward ever to be had for one's work, that the opinion of the world as to what I am doing becomes more and more indifferent to me.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Settling In

"Anne Page" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Boston was ready to welcome newcomer Dennis Miller Bunker and he was scarcely settled before we find him writing:

'I have already been asked to dine and spend the evening at the St. Botolph Club by a man I've never seen but once in my life, Mr. A.V.S. Anthony, the Engraver. Is there no way for a fellow to be let alone? What on earth am I to do in a club? ...I'd like to get back to some place like Paris where people would know what a bad painter I was.'

But in a few weeks he was himself a member of the St. Botolph Club, as well as of the newly founded Tavern Club, then established at 1 Park Square. He immediately appreciated the quality of the men he met at these places, speaking of them as a clever crowd who 'all do something and most of them do it extremely well.' 

At the Tavern Club he made warm friends also. He could not have found such an atmosphere other than congenial. There were comparatively few painters in its membership at the time. The most distinguished of the ones then present was Frederick Porter Vinton, an artist insufficiently appreciated today. Others were Benjamin C. Porter, Ignaz Gaugengigl and Henry O. Walker. From its beginnings, election to the Tavern Club was based on a candidate's capacity for congenial comradeship rather than on accomplishment.

In due course, many of the men who met Dennis Bunker at theses places invited the promising young man to their homes and the hostesses of Boston were quick to extend invitations to so beguiling a newcomer. It opened a new world to the young painter through which he moved with an amused smile. He executed a number of portraits for the most prominent families. The most delightful houses opened their doors to him and he formed many strong and lasting friendships," but even so it was New York to which he aspired.

To be continued

(Extracts are from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Teacher

"Meadow Lands" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker was certainly a fine teacher of his art and, had he lived longer, he might well have become a great teacher. He had a rare gift for putting into clear and unforgettable phrases the fundamental principles on which the art of paint is based. To make these simple truths cogent realities to the student is perhaps the most important part of teaching. It is certainly the most difficult part, because their essential meaning can only be grasped by a person whose aesthetic perceptions have been developed to the degree necessary for the understanding of their application to the concrete problems of painting pictures. The validity of certain axioms becomes apparent to the art student only as his eye becomes trained to perceive visual facts which are imperceptible to the layman. His awareness of these facts is developed by two things: by the actual practice of drawing and painting from nature and by hearing from his teacher restatements, in diverse applications, of the general principles underlying visual phenomena. Perception and understanding develop together. A good teacher of painting never loses sight of this fact and has the ability to adjust his generalizations to the growing understanding of each student. This is just what Bunker did.

• A few examples may served to give an idea of his ability to go to the heart of a matter in a simple and direct statement. 'Why don't you paint what you see? It's just as easy and twice as interesting,' Bunker would say to bring home to his pupils the aesthetic justification of truthful representation.
  
  
• 'Keep on preparing your picture, and some morning you'll come in and find it finished,' was an axiom of his, a rather dark saying the profundity of which is increasingly apparent to the mature artist the longer he paints.

Former students at Cowles remembered two charcoal drawings hanging in one of the halls. These drawings, which Dennis Bunker had made in Paris, were studies of casts in the gallery of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, one of the them representing the figure of Day from the Medici tombs, the other the torso of Ilissus. On the latter drawing Gerome had written: 'Ces torses sont la base de l'education. It faut etre nourri sur ces choses-la dans la jeunesse ['These torsos are the basis of education. You have to be fed on these things in youth.'] J.L Gerome.' This is of considerable interest, bearing, as it does, a message embodying one of the fundamental principles of nineteenth century academic art teaching."

  To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.) 

Dennis Miller Bunker: Teaching at Cowles

"Chrysanthemums" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker did not choose Boston as a place to live in because the city attracted him. He had been asked to take charge of the drawing and painting classes of the newly opened Cowles Art School and financial considerations compelled him to accept the offer. The school was installed in a building at 145 Dartmouth Street, approximately on the site of the present Back Bay railroad station. Bunker made one of studios in the building into living quarters, and there he also worked, to the sound of the Boston and Albany trains.

This art school was run after the pattern that was to become familiar everywhere a few years later. It was directed by an administrator who divided the various tasks of teaching among his staff of instructors.  Although these latter were supposed to perfect their pupils in all the elements of the painter's art, their chief duties were to attract and to retain the largest possible number of students. The fact that the classes were necessarily filled chiefly with young people quite devoid of talent made the task utterly impossible. 

Twenty-four -year-old Bunker immediately recognized the absurdity of the system. He wrote to Joe Evans, "I see no possibility of making a strong school of it. What they care about more than anything else is to get the place full, indeed I don't think it would run otherwise, and they don't care who they take in. Of course, I feel bound to treat them decently no matter what they do, but it's hard work sometimes.' 

He did not realize that he was struggling with a small and comparatively well-run example of the kind of institution which, in the short space of fifty years, was to bring about the collapse of that very art of painting which he so loved. But he felt that his efforts were wasted, as to a great extent they undoubtedly were. Had he lived to see the development of his best pupil, William Paxton, he might have considered the sacrifice of his time justified. Certainly Paxton always believed that he owed a great deal of his own sound craftsmanship to Bunker's teaching and said so throughout his life."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Farewell to Paris

"The Pool, Medfield" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Nineteenth century Paris was the most fascinating spot in all the world for a student of painting. The monumental aspect of the great capital was not essentially different from that familiar to tourists before the world wars. But the picturesque side of the city had not then been sacrificed to 'confort moderne,' or to the still more devastating demands of the automobile. In the 1880s no influx of American tourists had as yet aroused an antagonism causing Frenchmen to withdraw among themselves, closing their doors to foreigners, as they did for a time after the turn of the century. The Louvre held out its vast store of treasures to the eager students, and the Luxembourg exhibited pictures far more representative of what was best in contemporary art than the canvases to be seen there in more recent years. Furthermore, the celebrated artists then working and teaching in Paris were recognized throughout the civilized world as the greatest masters of the day. In the eighties Paris was the capital of the art world, in fact as well as in name.

Before he left for America, Dennis Miller Bunker's fellow students gave him a farewell dinner at which Kenneth Cranford and Charles Platt were present. That Gerome himself attended this dinner testifies to the impression made by the young American. Years later Cranford mentioned the occasion in a letter to his brother, recalling a speech Gerome had made in the course of the evening. He had warned the American students that they were leaving a city where painters lived and breathed in an atmosphere of art for a land in which that stimulating atmosphere was lacking. He told them that it would take all their courage to hold to their objective under those conditions. This prophecy was to prove only too true for Dennis Bunker, who never ceased to grumble at the artistic aridity of life in America, and especially in Boston. From that city he wrote a few months later, 'I am before all a painter, and I'll be hanged if I see how the charming verses of Mr. Longfellow or the essays of Mr. Emerson can make up to a man for the loss of the Louvre, or in fact for a single good word from the patron.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Studies in Paris

"Pink Rose" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"In the 1880's New York had little to offer a prospective painter. American art and artists were poorly thought of in the growing metropolis. The teaching to be had in the Academy schools was for those days mediocre, though Dennis Miller Bunker's own development in their classes demonstrates the fundamental soundness of their methods. But the atmosphere could not have been inspiring.

Inevitably his thoughts turned to Paris, the city which at that time held undisputed leadership in artistic matters. The Bunkers, with their Quaker traditions must have found it difficult to accept the idea of the boy's going off to the French capital, but Dennis was allowed to go.

We can only imagine what his life in Paris must have been like. He had sailed with the intention of living on a dollar and a half a day 'exclusive of clothes,' a rate of expenditure which seems fantastically small today, but which was not beyond the bounds of reason in the Paris of the eighties. Regardless of whether he was able to keep his expenses down to this low figure, the boy certainly lived modestly. His work at the atelier - first at Julian's then that of Jean Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux Arts - took up most of his days, as well as many of his evenings, while the remainder, when not devoted to reading or drawing, were presumably spent after the manner of the rapins who gathered in the studios and cafes of Montmartre. 

His two intimate friends were Charles A. Platt and Kenneth Cranford, and with the two he made excursions into the French countryside during the summer months. The many landscapes which he brought home to America prove that these trips were not spent in idleness.

A letter from Charles Platt to his family refers to Bunker: 

'In company with a couple of friends, Bunker and Cranford, I left Paris for the summer . . . I think you know who Bunker is - a New Yorker, nephew of Mr. Gifford. I used to know him in New York and have seen a good deal of him this winter. He is small and rather handsome and is, I believe, one of the strongest draughtsmen in Gerome's atelier. He had a studio in New York before he came here and he painted some very nice and carefully finished pictures.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: Beginnings

"Salt Marsh Landscape with Two Children near
a Beached Sailboat and Dory" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker was born on November 6, 1861, the son of Quakers Matthew Bunker and Mary Anne Eytinge Bunker. Four children were born to them, of which Dennis was the second oldest. 

Like all boys intended by nature to develop into painters, Dennis drew constantly from early childhood. A few undated drawings and watercolors still exist which were presumably made while he was a young boy. They show talent, but are not remarkable. An oil study preserved in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum might well have been painted when he was not more than seventeen. In default of any record about this study, we may assume that he came across it among his things one day when he was living in Boston and that he gave it to his friend and benefactress, Mrs. Gardner, half-jokingly, as an example of his boyish efforts.

He was about seventeen when he started to attend art classes regularly in New York. He worked both at the Art Student's League and at the National Academy of Design. William M. Chase taught painting at the League in those years, and it was doubtless under his instruction that Bunker developed his innate flair for handling pigment, a quality which gives distinction and charm to his earlier pictures. The brownish tonality of these pictures also suggest the Munich tradition, which Chase was introducing in New York. 

Years later, Chase was heard to refer to Bunker as one of his most gifted pupils. But the sound foundation in drawing which the boy acquired before he went to Paris seems to have come from another teacher. He at some point studied landscape with Charles Melville Dewey and there is some ground for supposing that he may have come under the influence of Eastman Johnston during his visits to Nantucket. At any rate a picture in the L.D.M. Sweat Memorial Gallery at Portland, Maine, which Bunker painted towards the end of his student year in New York, shows that the training he received during this period was extremely sound."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.) 

Dennis Miller Bunker: Prologue

Dennis Miller Bunker

"To those of us who were art students in Boston during the early years of the century Dennis Bunker seemed an almost legendary figure. Our teachers referred to his paintings in terms of praise which they accorded few modern pictures, and we knew those men to be severe critics of an art in which they were themselves competent practitioners. We were familiar with a few of Bunker's canvases, and to them we went to study the brilliant solution of technical problems with which we were struggling. Occasionally, too, we heard references to this young man's fascinating personality, to his brilliant and varied gifts, and to the extraordinary promise of a career cut off suddenly by death at the age of twenty-nine. It all pieced together to create a figure more like the typical genius of storybooks than anything to be encourntered in real life. 

No painter at all cognizant of his own craft could examine the 'Jessica' in the Boston Museum, the portrait in the Metropolitan, or the magnificent landscape in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, without realizing that here was work of exceptional distinction. The more curious could not fail to wish for further knowledge of the man who had painted these delicate and lovely things, or to wonder what other pictures by him might be in existence.

When I belatedly undertook to gather data for Bunker's biography, I was still able to obtain the help of his widow, Mrs. Charles A. Platt, who had preserved a large number of her first husband's letters. A few of the artist's acquaintances were living and from these sources, as well as from what the artist has revealed of himself in his paintings, there emerged a well-defined personality fully as remarkable as the legendary Bunker of our student days. 

This book is an attempt to record his life... and to interpret his pictures in their own terms as those terms are understood by a painter who studied with Dennis Bunker's most eminent pupil."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell. Mr. Gammell studied with William McGregor Paxton, who had studied with Dennis Miller Bunker.)

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 6

Detail of "Thomas McKeller" by John Singer Sargent

"John Sargent extracted and made visible the actual beauty of the world; and never so much as in the innumerable oil sketches and watercolors which make him one of the greatest of landscape painters. But I want to close on another note.

More and more it has seemed to me that Sargent's life was absorbed in his painting, and the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be: 'He painted.' To some of us he seemed occasionally to paint to the exclusion of living. In latter years he seemed to be painting from morning till night, an easel, more than metaphorically, in every  corner, a picture under way for every effect of changing weather. 

But looking over the portfolios and portfolios of sketches, thinking of all the more elaborated landscapes: Venice, Carrara Quarries, Alps, Architecture, and even such things as some divinely exquisite silvery wooden paling against a green Tyrolese meadow, I recognize that his life was not merely in painting, but in the more and more intimate understanding and enjoying the world around him, and which the work of his incomparable hand enables some of us, also, to understand and enjoy, if only in part.

As regards our friendship, I have sometimes regretted that, having started with such early intimacy, I did not get, or try, to know John Sargent better. But, after all, what can be better than knowing a great man, not in the details of his common personal existence, but in the impersonal feelings and thoughts special to his greatness, and which he enabled us to share with him?"

Vernon Lee

Oxford, August 13th, XXV.

(Excerpts from "J.S.S.: In Memoriam." by Vernon Lee.)

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 5

"Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice"
by John Singer Sargent

"This legend of John Singer Sargent and his father is, properly, all I [Vernon Lee] have to tell about him. For our real intimacy did not last beyond those years of our childhood which good fortune gave us in each other's company in Rome. While my people returned to Rome for another four or five years, John Sargent's family, perhaps for the sake of a very good boys' school, settled in Florence. And when circumstances drifted us also to Florence in 1873, Dr. and Mrs. Sargent, with Emily and an additional little daughter, had settled once more at Nice. So our meetings became rare and brief.

As happens (or happened in those distant more conservative times) once friends always friends. We corresponded more or less regularly, John and Emily and I. Indeed, I confess that my belief that John Sargent was going to be the great painter of the future, a belief whose realization was later to surprise me as a wonderful coincidence, was at bottom due to a general faith that everyone connected with myself must partake in the glory of my secret adolescent daydreams.

During one brief meeting on the Lake of Como - we were respectively fourteen and thirteen - we picked up figs which had dropped over villa walls, while continuing our discussion on the merits of Canova versus the Antique and Guido Reni compared with Rafael. At another time Mrs. Sargent, my mother, John, Emily and myself rambled by moonlight through the mediaeval arcades and under the leaning towers and crenellations of Florence. Of a morning, we would spend hours over portfolios of prints and the unreadable scores of the music school. He readily set to copying some marvellously hideous portraits of the musicians, so that I still cherish a careful watercolor of a youthful portrait of Mozart.

By the time I was a half-baked polyglot scribbler of sixteen, and John a year older: a tall, slack, growing youth with as yet no sign of his later spick-and-span man-of-the-world appearance; did he not protect his rather stooping shoulders with a grey plaid shawl? ... He had very nearly completed his classical education in that Florence school and sundry German gymnasia, working hard, meanwhile, wherever there was an opportunity of drawing from the life or from casts: he was within a year or two of the promised initiation into Paris art schools and entire independence. Yet so great was his, I know not whether to call it modesty or reserve, that I cannot remember his ever mentioning his future. 

Indeed, as time interposed longer intervals between our meetings, and filled up the intervening absences more and more with interests unshared by the other, the word 'curious,' pronounced with a long and somehow aspirated 'u', became the keynote of John Sargent's and my conversation; the word representing a stereotyped reciprocal attitude such as often all that remains in the externally unchanged relations of once fraternal friends."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Vernon Lee's "J.S.S.: In Memoriam.")

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 4

"George McCulloch" by John Singer Sargent

"At the end of that winter in Rome, John Sargent's father, from no compliance with his delightful and insistent wife, still less owing to an expressed wish (I feel sure) on the part of that grave and docile son, so absorbed in the sights of the moment and the precocious habit of translating them into lines and colours - quite spontaneously - found himself face to face with the startling possibility that God (since Dr. Sargent saw God's work everywhere) had given him a son who was a painter, and that if such proved to be the case, why his own wishes and hopes must go to the wall. I have confused remembrance of words to some such effect, words spoken before me or to my parents, or perhaps guesswork on the part of my more precociously world-wise self. For, as already said, John seemed too much absorbed in his gifts to be thinking of their future, or to use childish pressure and machinations (as I might have done) to secure their cultivation. 

Be that as it may, the sacrifice was made, and in the completest, wisest manner: all facilities should be granted for John to become a painter, but never an amateur, and only when he had received such education as might enable him to know his own mind and, if need be, turn to other things. But of the U.S. Navy there could, of course, be no more question. I cannot help thinking that this legend of Dr. Sargent's sacrifice of his wishes and fears to his son's genius is, whether or not literally true, beautiful enough for us to hope it may contain a core of truth. 

And its beauty is heightened, its truth vouched for, by my recollection of the attitude of John Sargent when he had long been a universally recognized great man, and his father, after a life of empty expatriation, had become a silent and broken old one. Shortly before his life came to its end, I chanced to stay with the Sargent family, and I can never forget the loving tenderness with which, the day's work over, John would lead his father from the dinner table and sit alone with him till it was time to be put to bed. 'I am going to sit and smoke,' the old man repeated evening after evening, 'with my son John.' That, and not any consideration of this great painting or that, is what rounds off the legend of John Sargent's boyhood when we were children together, more than fifty years ago."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "J.S.S.: In Memoriam" by Vernon Lee.)

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 3

"Breakfast in the Loggia" by John Singer Sargent

"In Rome (1868-69), John Singer Sargent's parents kept a white-capped chef and gave dinner parties with ices. For it would happen that when myself and protecting housemaid had clambered up the 200 steps leading from our Piazza Mignelli to the one-storeyed and many-windowed house, hired for the winter by John and Emily's parents, I would meet cabs and vetture di rimessa, drawn up outside, and we children would eat downstairs while the dinner party above sent us down its sumptuous broken victuals. 

Meanwhile, in the drawing room, where the cupola of St. Peter's looked straight in at the windows for all the world like its sunset effigy on the lampshades we tried to imitate, in the drawing room, between the marble busts of George Washington and of the goddess Isis, there were being entertained some of those legendary artists: Harriet Hosmer, Randolph Roger, W.W. Story, and so forth, were having coffee upstairs, with a due proportion of painters almost as crimson and gold as those lampshades.

And to these now long-forgotten immortals, Mrs. Sargent would occasionally display the sketches which her boy had made (using the maternal paint box) when she sat on her campstool on some Roman villa terrace or before some sunset-flushed broken arches of an aqueduct. Of course the boy would never be more than an amateur, since he was, you know, going into the U.S. Navy. But for an amateur surely not without promise?

I then saw clearly dear, eloquent, rubicund, exuberant Mrs. Sargent, exhibiting those sketches not without wistful glances. And, on the other side, Dr. Sargent, a little averted, or, at most, with some curt glance or word expressing his estimation of that small boy's futile talent; and, to anyone who could take his meaning, his repulsion from all this art, this expatriated fooling with paints and clay and all this doubtful world of marble fauns and spurious romance when there, out there, was the real, manly romance of the high seas - a vocation from which he himself, possibly for health reasons, had been thwarted."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "J.S.S.: In Memoriam" by Vernon Lee.)

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 2

"Village Children" by John Singer Sargent

When Vernon Lee was twelve, as she recounts, "The Sargents began to play a dominant part in my life. We had moved into a gaunt house facing the sea and the sweep of the promenade des Anglais. Then was established a regular coming and going between us. Afternoons, moreover, were spent in painting.

I do not know whether at that time John Sargent yet possessed a paintbox of his own. He certainly used mine. And I feel sure that my perennial supplies of watercolors and porcelain palettes and albums of vario-tinted paper were what drew him to me; and that our fraternal friendship grew out of those afternoons of painting together. Together, in the sense that we consumed refreshments and paints in company, and conversed the while on elevated topics: I must have poured forth about the weekly nights in the family's box at the Nice opera, with vocal imitations, perhaps, of performers and discussion of the verisimilitudes in Verdi's and Donizetti's librettos. 

But never did John Sargent participate in my pictorial self-expression or show any interest therein. To him paints were not for the telling of stories. There were illustrated books and papers lying about, and a stretch of Mediterranean and perspectived houses and coastlines looked in at the windows, and to the reproduction of all these did John Sargent apply himself. - and with miraculous intuition and dexterity. 

I can see the clean juxtaposed blue and green of sky and waves, the splendid tossing lines of sea and ships, see even the bold pencil title in a clearer version of his grown-up writing, the title in a corner, 'U.S. Ship (name, alas, forgotten!) Chasing the Slaver 'Panther.' His sister, on my mentioning this work, suggests that he may have copied it from some 'Illustrated London News' or suchlike. But even if it was so copied, the rendering of the composition, the quality of the lines, above all, the fresh, slick color which he had added, made it into a free translation, indeed, a transfiguration. Thus did he already see in that marvellous mind's eye of his, the things presented by Nature, or by other of her interpreters. At Nice in 1867-68, John Sargent, in furtive use of his mother's paints or long afternoons with my preposterous and horribly messy boxes, was already a painter. In spirit and in fact."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Vernon Lee's "J.S.S.: In Memoriam.")

John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam

Detail of "Vernon Lee [Violet Paget]" by J.S. Sargent

After John Singer Sargent's death, his old friend Vernon Lee wrote her memories of him and his family. Here are two excerpts:

"Take, for instance, the matter of John Sargent's heredity, and the respective parts played by his parents. Already his sisters have demurred to my view, and tell me that his special gifts must have come from his father's side, since among his paternal ancestors there was, at least, one painter of Colonial times. But to me, who see in recollection Mrs. Sargent painting, painting, painting away, always an open paint box in front of her, through all the forty years I knew her, her whole jocund personality splashed, as it were, with the indigo of seas and the carmine of sunsets, to me the painting gift of John Sargent is all from his mother; while what he had from his father was the deep-seated character, the austere, self-denying strength which smelted and tempered that talent into genius."

"When I was a child, and John and Emily and I (eighteen months separating the youngest of us from the eldest) were children together, for two winters at Nice and one (so memorable) in Rome. I adored Mrs. Sargent and was rather afraid of Dr. Sargent. Not that he ever scolded me, or his own children in my presence. With perfect courtesy he passed over my vain little person, whereas Mrs. Sargent, bubbling with sympathies and the need for sympathy, treated everyone as an equal in the expansiveness of her unquenchable youthfulness and joie de vivre. When I come to think of it, Dr. Sargent could not have been so very tall, but his head seemed higher up than other people's, longer and stiffer. One knew whenever he spoke, not without an austere twang; and I, at all events had a childish impression that his words implied disapproval." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "J.S.S.: In Memoriam" by Vernon Lee.)

John Singer Sargent: The Final Voyage

"Cashmere" by John Singer Sargent

"In April, 1925, John Singer Sargent was once more due to start for America. He had shown no outward sign of ill health. His friends had thought him tired, but he had been pursuing his ordinary life of unrestricted activity. For several days he had been engaged in his preparations, packing, lifting cases, and, in disregard of the protests of his friends, putting on himself a physical strain of much severity. On the evening of the 14th a few of his friends met at 10 Carlyle Mansions for a farewell dinner given by Miss Sargent: Mrs. Ormond, Lady Prothero, the two Misses Barnard, L.A. Harrison, Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks and Nelson Ward.

Sargent was in high spirits, he had dispatched to America the final installment of his decorations for the Museum of Fine Arts and he was spending his last evening with his friends. He acted, as he always did at his sister's parties, as host. The party, as was the custom, broke up at 10:30. The guests said goodbye, with wishes for Sargent's speedy return; and then, after lingering a little with his sister, he drove away.

It was his habit to read before going to sleep. When the maid knocked at his door on the morning of April 15, there was no answer. John Sargent was dead. Beside him lay an open volume of the 'Dictionaire Philosophique' of Voltaire. His glasses had been pushed up over his brow. He had the aspect of one quietly sleeping. Death had come with soundless tread, 'unexpected and unrecognized,' as in January, 1905, he had written of his mother."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

"Quarry at Chocorua" by John Singer Sargent

"John Singer Sargent's watercolors have a happy air of impromptu, of the artist having come upon a scene at a particular moment and there and then translated it into paint. He had a preference for scenes in which the hand of man had taken a part. If he turned to natural scenery, he chose wildness rather than beauty, strange effects in mountain formations, gorges, tumbling glaciers or rocks strewn as though they were the missiles on a Titans' battlefield. But whatever he painted, watercolor in his hands seemed to lose something of its limitation and become a more powerful medium, giving the substances represented a solidity and volume more associated with oil color. 

His general habit was to make the lightest indications in pencil to fix the relative position of objects, and then, after wetting the paper, to paint with great rapidity. It was not his habit to use the opaque method. He trusted for his highlights to the white of the paper. From the white of the paper he would with equal facility conjure the satin of a dress, the texture of a marble, or the silky flanks of the ox. 

He paints as a man of muscle rather than mood. His power is displayed in the supremacy of his drawing, the opulence of his color, the skill of his statement, finite as it often is, and the glowing warmth of his sunlit scenes. And in these he excels, not so much by the subtlety of his omissions as by the harmony of his assertions and his exuberant objectivity.

Of his own watercolors he was a severe critic; rarely satisfied, deprecating praise, and always ready to point out what he regarded inadequate or mistaken. When he brought home one of his well-known sketches, 'Quarry at Chocorua,' Mrs. James said to him: 'How delightful it must be to know that every time you work you will bring back something fine.' Sargent replied: 'But I hardly ever do! Once in a great, great while.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)

John Singer Sargent: Honors and Shyness

"Reconnoitering (Ambrogio Raffele)" by John Singer Sargent

"In the course of his career John Singer Sargent received decorations and diplomas from many countries: America, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium, each in turn paid him honour. In England in 1904 he received a D.C.L. [Doctor of Civil Law] from the University of Oxford. In 1907 he was offered a knighthood by the Prime Minister. Pleading his American citizenship, he declined. In 1913 he was give the degree of LL.D. [Doctor of Laws or an honorary degree] by the University of Cambridge. Gratifying as these titles may have been, they were a source of great perturbation to Sargent in so far as they necessitated a public appearance. Even when assured that no speech would be expected he seemed afraid lest some unforeseen contingency should bring upon him the hated ordeal. In reply to a letter asking him to address a philosophical society of Harvard University on Art he drafted this reply:

 'Dear Sir, It is an honour that I fully appreciate and am deeply grateful for having been thought entitled to. I should be pleased to accept if I had the least right to hope that a miracle would happen in my favour. The miracle of overcoming something like panic when asked to speak has never happened to me yet, and the spectacle of panic instead of a speech is the entertainment I have afforded and long wince resolved not to afford again. The annals of the society would have a disaster to chronicle that I feel bound to spare them by declining an honour that would entail the saddest consequences...'

This nervousness in public did not hinder him from doing public work. It did, however, prevent him, on the resignation of Sir Edward Poynter in December, 1918, from accepting the Presidency of the Royal Academy. When pressed very hard he said to his friend Sir Arthur Cope: 'I would do anything for the Royal Academy but that, and if you press me any more, I shall flee the country.' Sir Arthur adds: 'There is no doubt that if he had allowed his name to stand he would have been elected, not only without dissent, but with acclamation.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)

John Singer Sargent: The Choice of Subject

"Gassed" by John Singer Sargent

"The subject which John Singer Sargent had been specially invited to paint was a scene illustrating the co-operation of British and American troops. But there were difficulties with that as he discussed in a letter: 

'British and American troops working together,' has sat heavily upon me for though historically and sentimentally the thing happens, the naked eye cannot catch it in the act, nor have I, so far, forged the Vulcan's net in which the act can be imprisoned... How can there be anything flagrant enough for a picture when Mars and Venus are miles apart whether in camps or front trenches...

'I have only seen three fine subjects with masses of men - one a harrowing sight, a field full of gassed and blindfolded men - another a train of trucks packed with 'chair a cannon' - and another frequent sight a big road encumbered with troops and traffic...'

But in the end it was the scene which he witnessed with Professor Tonks, that was chosen as the subject for his war picture 'Gassed.' During an attack by the English the Germans had put down a gas-shell barrage, which failed to stop the advance. Later in the day the heat of the sun set the gas in movement, and the 99th Brigade and the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Division, passed through it to capture Courcelles and suffered its effects. It is the men of these units that appear in the picture. When the picture was finished Sargent was in doubt what to call it.

He wrote: 'I don't quite agree with your objections to the title 'Gassed.' The place is merely a clearing station that they were brought to - the date would lead people to speculate as to what regiments were reduced to that pitiable condition, and I think their identity had better not be indicated. The word 'gassed' is ugly, which is my own objection, but I don't feel it to be melodramatic, only very prosaic and matter of fact.'

The painting carries a great deal of sentimental significance. He has shown some of the horror of War, much of the moral quality of those taking part in it, and has interpreted the emotional intensity of a scene calculated to rouse compassion in the onlooker. The subject has been treated with impressive simplicity with the severity of a processional frieze. There is no striving after the picturesque. Dramatic account has been entirely dispensed with. He has given a spiritual value to realism, and dignity and solemnity to the facts. The desultory rhythm of the figures silhouetted against the sky, the diffused light of evening, the harmony of colour with which the scene is invested, have entered into the inspiration."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)