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Dennis Bunker Painting at Calcot
John Singer Sargent American
Not on view
Sargent met the young American artist Dennis Miller Bunker (1861–1890) in Boston during Sargent’s first working trip to America in 1887. Sargent invited Bunker to spend time with him in England, and, the following summer, Bunker visited Sargent in Calcot, a suburb near Reading, where this picture was painted.
Sargent poses Bunker standing by a riverside, with a female figure, almost certainly Sargent’s sister Violet, seated on the bank. Bunker, holding his palette, has stepped back from his canvas—presumably to study the overall effect of the work in progress. Sargent renders the lush green landscape in vibrant, broken color and with highly visible brushstrokes. Bunker, one of the first American painters to embrace an Impressionist practice, died suddenly from meningitis only two years after this painting was made.
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