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.)