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