Dennis Miller Bunker
1861-1890
Dennis Miller Bunker was an American painter and innovator of American Impressionism. Bunker was one of the major American painters of the late 19th century. His mature works include both brightly colored landscape paintings and dark, finely drawn portraits and figures.
Dennis Miller Bunker was born in New York. In 1876 he enrolled at the Art Students’ League and the National Academy of Design, and in 1882 he went to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under Jean-Léon Gérôme. He raveled through the French countryside and the coast of Normandy and Brittany.
When he came back, Dennis Miller Banker thought at the Cowles Art School in Boston. He met John Singer Sargent there. Banker did join Abbott Handerson Thayer and painted with him in South Woodstock, Connecticut. Bunker’s circle of friends included also Thomas Wilmer Dewing, William Merritt Chase, Stanford White, William Dean Howells, Charles Martin Loeffler, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He received an offer to teach at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after Bunker married Eleanor Hardy and moved to New York, he died in 1890 of cerebro-spinal meningitis.
The paintings of Bunker’s early maturity in New York were often marine subjects, featuring a series of beached boats, painted on Long Island. In these he followed the standard academic practice of first painting loose, preparatory sketches prior to more conventionally finished exhibition pieces.
While studying in Paris, Bunker’s summer excursions to the countryside resulted in another series, this time of scenes of Larmor, a town in Brittany. The focus of these compositions is church spire, cemetery cross, or a lone tree, was invariably that of a richly painted, dark graphic shape against a bright sky. The pictures are characterized by soft atmospheric effects and tonal subtlety. After returning to America Bunker continued painting the landscapes in South Woodstock, Connecticut still favor dramatic value contrasts, with subjects carefully painted against a light sky, but the palette has grown lighter, the color more saturated.
