Dennis Miller Bunker

In the autumn of 1888 a young New York painter set up his easel in Isabella Stewart Gardner's greenhouse at Green Hill, her estate in Brookline outside Boston, and painted her chrysanthemums. Dennis Miller Bunker was 27, and Gardner, the collector who would later build her own museum, had become his friend and patron. The picture is still in that museum.

Bunker had trained in New York and then in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, a strict academic master, and came to Boston in 1885 to teach figure drawing at the Cowles Art School. His early work was tight and dark. The change came through John Singer Sargent, the expatriate portrait painter, whom he met in late 1887. The next summer the two painted side by side in the English village of Calcot, and Bunker came home with a lighter palette and a looser hand. In the summers of 1889 and 1890 he painted the brooks and meadows around Medfield, south-west of Boston, in that new open-air manner.

He kept making dark, carefully studied portraits as well, and was trying to build a portrait practice when he married Eleanor Hardy, the daughter of a Boston merchant, in October 1890. Less than three months later, on 28 December, he died in Boston of meningitis, at 29. His friends the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed his gravestone.