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.)