Jessica

In the spring of 1890 Bunker was working in a New York studio on Washington Square, engaged to be married and trying to make his name as a portrait painter. For this picture he hired a professional model and posed her in profile, life-size and cut off at the bust, in a black dress against a dark ground, so that almost all the light falls on her face and her red hair. Nobody has explained the title. The painter and writer R. H. Ives Gammell later called this one of the most beautifully studied heads in American art, praising how quietly the tones shift across the face. Bunker signed and dated it lower right. He died that December, and the canvas passed to his mother-in-law, Mrs Alpheus Hardy of Boston. In April 1891 a group of his admirers raised the money to buy it for the Museum of Fine Arts.