Dennis Miller Bunker 1861-1890

Dennis Miller Bunker was born in New York and began his artistic training at a very young age at the National Academy of Design. From 1877 to 1879, he studied under the painters Charles Melville Dewey and William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League. In the autumn of 1882, he went to Paris, where he joined first Ernest Hébert’s atelier at the Académie Julian and then Jean-Léon Gérôme’s studio at the École des Beaux-Arts. Initially drawn to the Barbizon school and plein-air painting, Bunker spent his summers in the French countryside with fellow American artists Charles Adams Platt and Kenneth Rylance Cranford, painting directly from nature.

He returned to New York in 1885, then settled in Boston, where he taught for nearly five years at the Cowles Art School. That same year, he became a member of the city’s most influential artistic circles, including the St. Botolph Club and the Tavern Club, key centers for American Impressionism. During the winter of 1885–1886, he met Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famed Boston collector, who later introduced him to John Singer Sargent in November 1887. Sargent invited Bunker to spend the following summer in the English countryside at Calcott, near London (fig. 1). Under Sargent’s influence, Bunker’s painting took on a brighter, more luminous Impressionist style.

In May 1889, Bunker met his future wife, Eleanor Hardy, prompting him to move to New York in October. There, he painted numerous commissioned portraits and charming figure studies, earning the James Ellsworth Prize at the third annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago in June 1890. Tragically, he died of meningitis only a few months later at the age of twenty-nine. In 1891, Charles Platt and several friends honored him with an exhibition of his paintings and watercolors at the St. Botolph Club.

The oil on canvas presented here is undoubtedly one of Bunker’s most striking and unusual landscapes. The annotation “Paris 1884” in the lower right corner indicates it was painted during his formative stay in France. Attuned to plein-air painting, Bunker captures the misty atmosphere of a moonrise over open countryside. The horizon, placed roughly two-thirds up the canvas, is animated only by the ghostly silhouettes of a few trees. While the painting may have been completed in his Paris studio, it is more likely linked to his summer 1884 trip to the Larmor region on Brittany’s southern coast, an area prone to fog.

The fragmented, modern brushwork demonstrates Bunker’s early engagement with Impressionist experimentation. By combining a highly minimalist, almost abstract composition with a deliberately limited palette of subtle grays and whites, Bunker conveys the essential qualities of American Tonalism while paying homage to Whistler’s nocturnes.