Dennis Miller Bunker: Teaching at Cowles

"Chrysanthemums" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker did not choose Boston as a place to live in because the city attracted him. He had been asked to take charge of the drawing and painting classes of the newly opened Cowles Art School and financial considerations compelled him to accept the offer. The school was installed in a building at 145 Dartmouth Street, approximately on the site of the present Back Bay railroad station. Bunker made one of studios in the building into living quarters, and there he also worked, to the sound of the Boston and Albany trains.

This art school was run after the pattern that was to become familiar everywhere a few years later. It was directed by an administrator who divided the various tasks of teaching among his staff of instructors.  Although these latter were supposed to perfect their pupils in all the elements of the painter's art, their chief duties were to attract and to retain the largest possible number of students. The fact that the classes were necessarily filled chiefly with young people quite devoid of talent made the task utterly impossible. 

Twenty-four -year-old Bunker immediately recognized the absurdity of the system. He wrote to Joe Evans, "I see no possibility of making a strong school of it. What they care about more than anything else is to get the place full, indeed I don't think it would run otherwise, and they don't care who they take in. Of course, I feel bound to treat them decently no matter what they do, but it's hard work sometimes.' 

He did not realize that he was struggling with a small and comparatively well-run example of the kind of institution which, in the short space of fifty years, was to bring about the collapse of that very art of painting which he so loved. But he felt that his efforts were wasted, as to a great extent they undoubtedly were. Had he lived to see the development of his best pupil, William Paxton, he might have considered the sacrifice of his time justified. Certainly Paxton always believed that he owed a great deal of his own sound craftsmanship to Bunker's teaching and said so throughout his life."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)