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.)