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.)