Dennis Miller Bunker: Unexpected Demise

"Portrait of Eleanor Hardy Bunker"
by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis and Eleanor Bunker went directly to New York after the wedding, settling in a studio in the Sherwood Building, on the corner of 57th Street and 6th Avenue. The weeks that followed were truly happy ones. They prepared their meals in the studio or went out to eat at restaurants. Their artist friends gave them a hearty welcome. And, as always, Dennis Bunker painted, this time using his beautiful bride as a model. It was during these weeks that he made the fine study of her owned by the Metropolitan Art Museum and started a larger canvas, of which a superbly indicated head remains as a fragment. He also started work on sketches for four decorative medallions ordered by Stanford White for a ceiling in the house of Mr. Whitelaw Reid.

The young couple returned to Boston for a Christmas visit at the Hardy's. The day after Christmas Dennis Bunker was taken ill and the doctor diagnosed influenza. He died early on the morning of December 28th.

The tragedy of this sudden death, ending a career which had promised such high achievement, was deeply felt by all his friends, as well as by the larger circle who knew only the painter's work. A letter written by William Dean Howells to Mrs. Bunker perhaps most adequately conveys the sorrow of those who had been associated with her husband.

'We know we cannot help your grief but we know from our own heartbreak that we shall not hurt it by trying to tell you how truly we sorrow with you. Your husband was our very dear and honored friend and at one time he came and went in our house almost like one of ourselves. We loved him for the goodness we felt in him as much as we admired him for his rare and beautiful gift. I shall never forget the noble seriousness with which he once talked to me of death, as something he had not been afraid to face in his thoughts; and now that he has gone where we shall all follow he has left us the precious meaning of a life full of gentle and patient courage.'

Dennis Bunker seems to have had a premonition of his limited time on earth for he wrote in an earlier letter to Eleanor: 'It is a mistake to have only one life. As for me I am only rehearsing in this one - I might be a painter if I could live again and begin afresh - we ought to be given three tries like the baseball men.' But he was wrong in his estimate of his achievement as a painter. A painter he was and in his brief life he attained a permanent place in American painting."

To be continued

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