Dennis Miller Bunker - An American in Medfield

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Brook at Medfield, 1889 (one of several versions of this motif)

Though his life would be tragically cut short just six years later, Dennis Miller Bunker at the age of 23 was one of the most promising of the young American Impressionists who sprang up in Boston toward the end of the 19th century. Bunker and other Boston painters mentored by William Morris Hunt - including Tarbell, Childe Hassam, Wm. Merrit Chase, and Frank Benson, became avid disciples of Monet. Collectively they’re referred to as the “Boston School.”

Bunker learned Impressionism from John Singer Sargent in England and while spending a summer painting with Monet. But in 1889, when Bunker couldn’t afford to return to England with Sargent, his patron Isabella Steward Gardner (who’d lost a young son, who had he lived would have been Bunker’s age) recommended the young man go and see Medfield, Mass.  

Medfield had already been immortalized after George Inness moved there with his family and began painting it around 1860. It was there, a few years later, that Inness, moved by the onset of the Civil War, created his first great, fully realized spiritual visions of the American landscape, paintings that would eventually give birth to the Tonalist movement, including his celebrated Peace and Plenty.

George Inness, Clearing Up (Medfield)

Isabella was in the habit of taking Boston socialites there for parties and concerts at the summer cottage of her friend Charles Martin Loeffler, a well-known composer and concertmaster for the BSO. Bunker fell in love with the place and, while staying at a congenial boarding house, painted dozens of canvases over the the summers of ’89 and ’90, his most productive years ever.

You can see examples of these paintings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The public saw the first of Bunker's Medfield paintings in 1890. 

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Pool, Medfield, 1889 or '90

A reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript wrote: "The skies are represented only by reflection in these interesting freaks of painting and they may be classified as bold and original experiments in the representation to that eternal phenomenon which possesses such a powerful fascination for all painters—sunlight."*

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Brook at Medfield

Those words are still true today. Bunker’s paintings of the brook at Medfield are unlike anything else of the time and instantly recognizable as his own. 

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Brook at Medfield, 1889/90

Evidently, he went at this most humble and ordinary subject with the same intensity of observation and execution that Monet lavished on his haystacks and Giverney. To my mind this is what makes Bunker's Medfield paintings seem so much more “American” than the more conspicuously European-influenced landscapes and parlor pieces of his Boston School peers (Tarbell and Hassam especially).

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Pool, Medfield, 1889

I was reminded of Bunker’s Medfield brook paintings when I cropped a photo that I snapped of work a friend showed me by contemporary Cornwall landscapist John Brenton (I’d classify his work a kind of neo-Impressionism). It’s going to be the starting point for a lesson on palette knife painting in my every-other-Wednesday painting classes in Exeter, NH and Lowell, Mass. 

The composition of the entirety of Brenton's painting, compared to Bunker's, is more conventional:

Meanwhile, I’m in touch with the Medfield Historical Society to see if the exact location of Bunker’s brook still exists. If so, I foresee a field trip this summer!

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Brook at Medfield, 1889

*My source for the historical background on Bunker and Medfield is town historian Richard deSorgher, writing for the Medfield Patch https://patch.com/massachusetts/medfield/desorgher-artists-of-medfield-dennis-miller-bunker

Postscript:

David Temple of the Medfield Historical Society has informed me that plenty of farmland and marshy grounds still exist in Medfield, all equally likely locations for Bunker's endeavors. According to him, there's a great book on Bunker by Erica Hirschler that I need to get hold of and which may well yield more info. Temple suggested that wherever Bunker painted would have to have been in walking or bicycling distance from where he was staying. He told me that although Hirschler believes Bunker boarded at 109 Main St., Medfield, the large c.1800 Goldthwaite family farmhouse that's there would be an unlikely candidate for a boarding house. According to Medfield historian Richard DeSorgher, Charles Martin Loeffler (Isabella Gardner's Medfield connection) was renting a cottage at 661 Main St., and Bunker stayed next door at Sewell's Tannery Farm, which is still there, at 663 Main St., "just before the vast open meadows of the Charles River." That sounds like the right place to look for Bunker's "brook." According to DeSorgher, Bunker wrote to Gardner: "You should see the Charles River, it has dwindled almost to a brook—and has lost all its Boston character. It is very charming—like a little English river—or rather a little like an English river. It runs here through the most lovely meadows, very properly framed in pine forests and low familiar looking hills — all very much the reverse of striking or wonderful or marvelous, but very quietly winning and all wearing so very well that I wonder what more one needs in any country. … The calmness of everything here — its roughness and simplicity is to me most charming and restful — and I feel more happy and in better courage." Sounds like marching orders to me - come summer, that is.

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John Henry Twachtman, Reckless Visionary

John Henry Twachtman, Gloucester Harbor Scene, c. 1901

Twachtman's sense of design is utterly masterful. On a recent trip to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, I sat for a while in front of the above painting and sketched it as a way of plumbing its mysteries. Deceptively simple, the interlocking geometric shapes, the subtle, asymmetrical arrangement of values, the vibrating colors - as with a lot of paintings I respond to, I experienced the whole thing gathering itself into a marvelous representation then threatening to collapse into random marks of colored paint only to gather itself once again into a representation on the verge of disintegration. 

John Henry Twachtman (1853 – 1902) was among a group of American Impressionists called The Ten who boycotted the commercial art market at the end of the 19th century. A restless experimenter, he pledged no allegiance to a single style. He was among the most original, modern, and poetic of his peers, either unwilling or unable to interest buyers in derivative or simply pretty images. His devotion to his personal vision brought him strong admiration from fellow artists, who deemed him a 'painter's painter' ahead of of his time.  

Twachtman, Edge of the Emerald Pool at Yellowstone

Few 19th century landscape artists were as willing or able to disregard convention and devote themselves to such a personal brand of Impressionism, not to mention such beautiful and radically simplified renderings of spontaneous experience. Look at the rich, boldly abstract color pattern in that Emerald Pool above! 


In Along the Fence (below), Twachtman takes a similar minimalist approach to big ideas. Here the treatment of humble subject matter, ennobled by a perfect degree of detail and a dignified composition, expresses the profound significance of the simplest dusty corner of the inhabited word. Twachtman's eye has singled out an anonymous series of warped, nailed-up boards mired in muddy earth-tones that, soaked as they are in generations of human presence, tell a strangely rich tale of human history expressed in the simplest imaginable terms. 


Thoreau said "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." By virtue of everything it leaves out, Along the Fence is an absolute treasure. 

Twachtman, Along the Fence

Here is Arques-la-Bataille, which some consider one of his greatest masterpieces. 

John Henry Twachtman, Arques-la-Bataille, 1885

As Linda Crank points out, there's a quiet circular composition underlying the whole: 


"First, the bold block of dark grass at center bottom commands the eye. Then the smaller clump to the middle left causes it to travel to the middle left. From there a variety of smaller shrubbery and grasses propel the vision around to the right in a circular motion. Strong horizontal lines emphasize the calmness of the foggy morning." 


Many of Twachtman's works, including Arques-la-Bataille, turn their backs on the established canon of Western aesthetics. Instead, they can often exhibit the sort of subtlety one finds in a Japanese garden, where objects are arranged in such a way as to relate at once to the random quality of "design" in nature and to our human hunger for the sense of a harmonious whole. I love the fresh, un-cliched design of the darks and lights in this tonalist piece:

Although I admit to having made pilgrimages to Gloucester, Rockport and similar locales, in this case, for me there's little mystique to where Twachtman painted. It's his absolute sincerity, his depth of thought and feeling, and his faithfulness to his responses to the immediate subject that make him great.


Twachtman's great paintings balance representation and abstraction in a very poetic, and at once very modern and classically restrained manner. His later works such as the Gloucester Harbour pictures above and below anticipate a style of painting that wouldn' t become popular until long after European Modernism came to America in 1911. One could do worse than to spend a day at the feet of such a master.

Twachtman, Goucester Harbor

Bruce Crane, winter radiance

Bruce Crane stands out as one of the most sensitive and ethereal of the American Tonalist painters who saw themselves as carrying the torch of the American landscape tradition after the demise of the 19th century Hudson River School style. Crane helped found a colony of landscape painters at Lyme Connecticut. Most active as a community during the first decades of the 20th century, they blent Barbizon and Impressionist sensibilities toward a fresh, evocative re-visioning of the American landscape.

His landscapes are spare, poetic meditations steeped in atmosphere. Painting into the 1920s, he increasingly suffused his arrangements of natural elements with a golden radiance suggestive of a spiritual sensibility. His subject is usually common scenery - everyday scraps of nature: pastures gone to seed, tall, thin scraggly trees, collapsing rock walls, fences, and stumps. But he wonderfully half-dissolves his forms in the airy atmosphere he builds around them (for all their subjects' gauziness, these paintings's surfaces are quite thick with substantial layers of paint).

Like so many of the Tonalists who followed in George Inness's footsteps, Crane spent time in Europe where he was awed by the compositions and moods of Barbizon painting. Inness, it seems, had articulated a vision of nature very like Crane's some years before.

The above painting is by Crane. In mood, tone, and even somewhat in composition it recalls a well-known Inness depicting a lone figure making its way through scrappy snow on Christmas Eve (below).

Another Inness in which Crane could have found inspiration for his own work.

I'll return to Crane another day to really get into some of his most interesting later work.