Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890)

Dennis Miller Bunker was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island.  In 1876, at the age of fifteen he moved to Manhattan and studied concurrently at the National Academy of Design as well as the Art Students League where he studied with William Merritt Chase from 1876 until 1881.  The following year he went to Paris and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Gerome.   He spent the summers of 1883 and 1884 touring and sketching the French countryside with fellow artists, Charles Platt (1861-1933), Kenneth Cranford (1857-1930) and Joseph Evans (1857-1898) who he met and at the Art Students League.  

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Bunker matriculated from the Ecole in 1884 and begrudgingly returned to New York where he lived for a year before settling in Boston in the fall of 1885.  Bunker accepted a position as chief instructor of painting at the newly opened Cowles Art School.  In the following years Bunker became good friends with John Singer Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner who were both major supporters of the arts and advocates for the emerging impressionist style.    

References: See Who Was Who In American Art (1999).; Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker, American Impressionist (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994).