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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Mystery and Poetic Painting

Emil Carlsen, Still Life with Brass and Oysters

A post on "Mystery" over at oil painter Stapleton Kearns' blog has me thinking about the importance of indeterminacy in my own work and its role in what's often called "poetic" painting.

As Stape points out, by the subtle use of soft edges and careful value adjustments a painter can suggest what's in the picture (and even what isn't!) without having to fully describe it. 

If "prosaic painting" describes, poetic painting evokes. A refreshing sense of control comes in simply realizing that one needn't (and probably shouldn't) delineate every part of a picture with equal clarity (a hallmark, by the way, of so-called primitive painting; selective detail is learned from the history of painting). 

George Inness, Georgia Pines

When it's done properly, "leaving something for the viewer's imagination" (the way George Inness does in the landscape above) invites a deeper engagement. Look how vague (or "suggestive," I should say) the details are throughout, even where the action is, in the middleground and at the horizon. On a surface level, the viewer must participate to "complete" the picture, filling in details where none are given. Such a painting discloses itself in stages, unfolding gradually as elements assemble before the viewer. The result is a vital, animated work of art that offers an experience full of freshness and life.

Taken a step further into metaphysics, however, the use of indeterminacy in painting can correlate with the unspoken, if not the unsayable - the ineffable in poetry and in human experience. 

George Inness, Green Marches

For me, indeterminacy functions in much of Inness's "visionary" work by evoking what I'd call the unknowable quality of felt experience. Hence: mystery. In Inness's "Green Marshes," the entire painting takes on the indistinct, shimmering quality of an emotion, a memory, or a dream.

The material world in Inness's later paintings often borders on insubstantial because for Inness, painting increasingly became a way to explore the dual nature of the world as simultaneously "material" and divine. The late works function as expressions of (or analogues for) spiritual experience. 

William James noted that one of the defining characteristics of mystical experience is that it cannot adequately be put into words. The painter interested in mystery paints that which "cannot be pictured," that is, things that can only be suggested and evoked yet never fully defined.

George Inness, In the Orchard, Milton

Innes's In the Orchard, Milton contains very little that is clearly delineated besides the sinuous tree trunk in the middle of the composition (which itself has the quality of semi-transparency). The rest is so suggested that at first I thought the lighter vertical element to the right of the curvy trunk was the sunlit trunk of a larger tree. Suddenly the figure of the woman coming toward us on the path vaporously emerged. The entire work comes to resemble a translucent tapestry, a lacy, gossamer veil swaying between one world and the next.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger described truth itself as aletheia, as an opening up, a "poetic revealing." In Being and Time, he describes meaning as a bringing-forth, rather than something we impose on the world. For Heidegger, meaning is a process of unconcealment, illuminating the essence of Being. By way of example, he writes about how Van Gogh's painting of a pair of old shoes conveys elements essential to humanity's relationship to the earth and, by extension, nature as a whole.

Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886)

By virtue of how suggestive these shoes are - not what the painting shows but what it alludes to, what such an image evokes about the life that has been lived in them - Heidegger  (and other philosophers, more or less) see an artist conceptualizing and presenting the essence of "shoeness."

For Heidegger, too, there's a "shining" quality to art's revelation of essential Being, something not unlike the "radiance" in Joyce's translation of Aquinas's model of beauty as wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Heidegger writes, "this shining (the "shining" of illuminated Being) joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness" (Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art). If any true work of art would have this quality of showing forth essence or Being, the indeterminacy and "mystery" in Inness functions both as a visual metaphor for, as well as the enactment of it.

But this is mere description, and utterly subjective. A painting just is. As my friend Dermot O'Brien recently reminded me, certain strangely emotive and vital works of art and literature magnificently and simply "refuse to permit reductive explication, much like life and love."

Glazing for Mood

Evening landscape by George Innes, 1890, produced by glazing.

In his biography of his father, American landscape painter George Inness, Jr., recounts the following anecdote concerning a demo his father performed for a student who'd come to call:

He squeezed a lot of raw umber on his palette, picked up the largest brush he could find, and with the aid of a medium that looked like Spaulding's glue he went at the canvas as though he were scrubbing the floor, smearing it over, sky and all, with a thin coat of brown. The young man looked aghast, and when Pop was through, he said:

"But, Mr. Inness, do you mean to tell me you resort to such methods as glazing to paint your pictures?"

Father rushed up to the young man, and, glowering at him over his glasses, as he held the big brush just under his visitor's nose, exclaimed:

"Young man, have you come here from the Art Students League to tell me how to paint? Then go back there and tell them that I'd paint with mud if it would give the effect I wanted."

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Glazing - the technique of applying thin, translucent washes of oil color in layers - became a common technique for oil painters shortly after the Northern European artists of the 1400s re-introduced oil painting into general artistic practice.

Tonal painting by George Inness

Inness used it habitually, casting about his studio for a likely victim, selecting a finished painting, a hillside in morning light, perhaps, and proceeding to set the sun on it, "painting, glazing, and scumbling, scratching, and scrubbing" right over the already dry paint, until he was satisfied and the morning had turned to dusk. 

I'd had this overly cool-toned marsh in my studio for too long, so I decided to try the Inness-esque glazing technique as I'd watched Dennis Sheehan perform it in a workshop last week. 

Cloudswept Marsh (before)

Going at it with Winsor-Newton Drying Linseed Oil (Sheehan uses Grumbacher's pale drying oil, btw) I combined a transparent or semi-transparent yellow mixed with a little red (in my case Cadmium Yellow and Alizarin Crimson) for overall warmth, and then painted more darks into the wet layer of tinted oil (I used M. Graham's transparent Olive Green) - "painting into the soup," as Inness called it. Personally I like it a lot better now.

Late Evening Marsh (after)