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Lot Essay
During his brief and celebrated career, Dennis Miller Bunker produced some of the most accomplished landscapes, still-lifes, and figural paintings of his generation. He counted among his friends many of the period's greatest artists, including John Singer Sargent, Edmund Tarbell, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing. He studied with William Merritt Chase in New York and Jean-Leon Gérôme in Paris. Bunker also enjoyed the patronage of the famous "Mrs. Jack," Isabella Stewart Gardner, who acquired two major paintings by the artist which still hang in her Boston museum, Fenway Court: The Brook at Medfield, and Chrysanthemums.
During the summer of 1883, Bunker traveled to the small village of La Croix, on the river Oise, where he worked in relative isolation while awaiting the resumption of classes with Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he had enrolled the year before. Bunker returned to Paris in October of 1883, and apparently turned his immediate attentions to the creation of the present work. As Erica Hirshler remarks, "it was common practice for a painter to use his summer sketches to create a finished picture in the studio, and this Bunker seems to have done in On the Banks of the Oise, which includes the familiar riverbank motif but is clearly inscribed 'Paris.' It shares the soft finish of the other Oise scenes [by the artist], but here Bunker emphasized the figure, perhaps in an attempt to create the sort of agreeable meditation on rural life that had won [Jean Charles] Cazin and others so much favor at the Salon." (Dennis Miller Bunker, American Impressionist, Boston, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 29).
Bunker painted On the Banks of the Oise in the tonal browns, greens, and grays characteristic of his earlier style (distinct from the more Impressionistic work of his later years). The painting depicts a woman who stands in silhouette against the river, which he renders in a silvery sheen. Behind the figure, a splash of sunlight illuminates a modern, steel and masonry bridge. With its limited palette and quiet tone, the painting suggests a Whistlerian simplicity enlivened by Bunker's sure hand at draftsmanship and his naturalistic depiction of the scene.
Having begun his studies the year before at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, On the Banks of the Oise not surprisingly exhibits the high technical standards characteristic of exhibition pictures of the time. For example, H. Barbara Weinberg has observed that this and other landscapes of the period by Bunker reveal "an emulation of Barbizon techniques in their tranquil, intimate compositions and tonal palette." (The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and Their French Teachers, New York, 1991, p. 125). Evidently, Bunker also considered On the Banks of the Oise a notable success, for the painting later appears as a backdrop in a posed photograph of the artist sketching a figure in his studio. More importantly, in its ambitious scale and brilliance of finish, On the Banks of the Oise marks one of the high moments in Bunker's early career.
During the summer of 1883, Bunker traveled to the small village of La Croix, on the river Oise, where he worked in relative isolation while awaiting the resumption of classes with Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he had enrolled the year before. Bunker returned to Paris in October of 1883, and apparently turned his immediate attentions to the creation of the present work. As Erica Hirshler remarks, "it was common practice for a painter to use his summer sketches to create a finished picture in the studio, and this Bunker seems to have done in On the Banks of the Oise, which includes the familiar riverbank motif but is clearly inscribed 'Paris.' It shares the soft finish of the other Oise scenes [by the artist], but here Bunker emphasized the figure, perhaps in an attempt to create the sort of agreeable meditation on rural life that had won [Jean Charles] Cazin and others so much favor at the Salon." (Dennis Miller Bunker, American Impressionist, Boston, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 29).
Bunker painted On the Banks of the Oise in the tonal browns, greens, and grays characteristic of his earlier style (distinct from the more Impressionistic work of his later years). The painting depicts a woman who stands in silhouette against the river, which he renders in a silvery sheen. Behind the figure, a splash of sunlight illuminates a modern, steel and masonry bridge. With its limited palette and quiet tone, the painting suggests a Whistlerian simplicity enlivened by Bunker's sure hand at draftsmanship and his naturalistic depiction of the scene.
Having begun his studies the year before at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, On the Banks of the Oise not surprisingly exhibits the high technical standards characteristic of exhibition pictures of the time. For example, H. Barbara Weinberg has observed that this and other landscapes of the period by Bunker reveal "an emulation of Barbizon techniques in their tranquil, intimate compositions and tonal palette." (The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and Their French Teachers, New York, 1991, p. 125). Evidently, Bunker also considered On the Banks of the Oise a notable success, for the painting later appears as a backdrop in a posed photograph of the artist sketching a figure in his studio. More importantly, in its ambitious scale and brilliance of finish, On the Banks of the Oise marks one of the high moments in Bunker's early career.