Description
Goblinssigned D. M. Bunker and dated 1886, l.r. - - oil on canvas37 1/2 x 49 3/4 in. (95.3 x 126.4 cm.)PROVENANCEReverend George Gardner Monks, BostonBy descent through the Monks family, BostonGift to Simmons CollegeEXHIBITEDChicago, Chicago Exposition, 1887 as A Winter's TaleBoston, Museum of Fine Arts, Dennis Miller Bunker: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, Oct., 1943 as Interior: Reading Aloud New Britain, The New Britain Museum of American Art, Dennis Miller Bunker Rediscovered, April-May, 1978New York, Davis & Long Gallery, Dennis Miller Bunker, June, 1978 as Reading AloudLITERATURER. H. I. Gammell, Dennis Miller Bunker, New York, 1953, p. 49, illus. as Reading AloudThis is Dennis Bunker's largest known work and his most ambitious figure painting. Though perhaps best-known today for his innovative Impressionist landscapes painted during his last two summers, Bunker actually adopted the strategies of that movement only for his outdoor landscape work. As a figure and portrait painter, he not only remained faithful to the academic precepts he had studied abroad, but as the most influential art teacher in Boston in the mid-1880s, his impact was central to two generations of the Boston School of Figure Painting. A Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins stands at a crucial juncture in this scenario.Bunker was born on Long Island and trained first in New York City at the Art Students League and the school of the National Academy of Design. In the autumn of 1882 he went to Paris, entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studying for a few months with Ernest Hebert, before entering the studio of Jean-Leon Gerome, where he remained until he returned to New York, probably early in 1885. Shortly thereafter he settled in Boston, and became the instructor of the life study and portrait classes of the newly formed Cowles Art School where Bunker was in charge of teaching artistic anatomy and composition.A Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins was the first significant picture that Bunker painted in his adopted city and demonstrates his mastery of academic principles which made him the ideal instructor at the school. The painting, in fact, may be thought of in part as a stirring example of Bunker's command of figural construction and anatomy, spatial structure, and tonal values of light and shade. As such, it offers evidence of the profound impact that Gerome exercised upon Bunker, and in turn demonstrates those qualities which Bunker passed down to such students at the Cowles School as William Paxton, who continued to revere Bunker throughout his long career. However, in place of his master's preference for exotic subject matter drawn from the ancient world and from North Africa and the Near East, Bunker created an American, domestic tribute to home and hearth and the middle-class family. This corner of the living room or study is a protected sanctuary of childhood, the various children of a modern family joined together through literary stimulation, as the oldest daughter (or possibly their young mother) reads to her siblings. The presence of the doll confirms the world and the pleasures of childhood. The family is designated as unostentatious, with the young women dressed in simple white home garments, though the elegance and affluence of the household is confirmed by the lovingly painted silver and porcelain tea service.The viewer is struck at first by the somber palette, dramatic lighting, and the grave expressions of the children, but the artist's title explains the sense of mystery and seriousness of the situation, while adding a romantic note. R. H. Ives Gammell, Bunker's early biographer, has suggested that the artist was here paying tribute to his admiration for the work of the Belgian painter, Alfred Stevens, but the simple bourgeois ambience and costumes are far from the sparkling elegance of Stevens' fashionable Parisian scenes. Rather, Bunker has here combined the academic precepts learned from Gerome with a middle-class, New England transcription of the many scenes of peasant children listening to a reading which he would have viewed in Paris at the Salon. Indeed, during his first Salon experience, when he would have been at his most impressionable, he would have seen Paul Hoecker's En Hollande and Edmond Adolphe Rudaux's Contes de Grand'mere, the latter especially a harbinger of Bunker's painting.Bunker had prepared for this elaborate composition, not only through his mastery of the figure, but through the creation of several smaller, probably figureless interiors, including the Interior of My Studio and Neglected Corner, the latter owned by the great collector, Thomas B. Clarke, and both shown in Bunker's first one-artist show held at the Noyes & Blakeslee Gallery in Boston in November of 1885. He identified the present work as depicting a winter's scene, and indeed, the picture was created between November of 1885 and March of 1886. A Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins is referred to, though only obliquely, in Bunker's letters to his close friend, the artist Joe Evans, with whom he shared an intense interest in theatre; Bunker understandably agonized over so elaborate and challenging a composition. On November 24, 1885, he noted to Evans that he had "commenced a picture but don't let's talk any more about it." In early December, he had shown the painting to one of the Taber brothers, a family of actors whom Evans much admired, and Bunker was gratified that Taber "seemed to think it was a good subject, which comforted me very greatly as I've a lurking fear that it is not. But Mr. T. seems after all to be a man of much discrimination and I dare say his judgement in such matters is rather to be relied upon." In another letter written about the same time, Bunker confessed that his picture was "in a dreadfully bad way. I can't seem to get on with it, although I work at it all the time." Finally, on March 19, 1886, Bunker was able to tell Evans that "my picture is finished."The picture was shown in May at the eighth annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York City, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is was admired by a number of critics. The writer for the New York Herald found the work "well painted and cleverly arranged," while the critic for the Mail and Express described it as "effective in arrangement and color" and "the most elaborate genre composition" in the show, with the "group of children listening, open-eyed, with eager interest to some eerie fable." The reviewer for Art Amateur was reminded of the old-fashioned family group described in the Vicar of Wakefield; the writer for the New-York Daily Tribune reserved his admiration for the figure of the young girl at the far left. A Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins would seem to have served as a significant influence on the work of J. Alden Weir, another Gerome-trained artist, whose prize-winning Idle Hours (Metropolitan Museum of Art) of 1888, shares the aura of tranquil sanctuary, based upon the thorough, sensitive understanding and practice of academic strategies.To date, the models utilized here have not been identified though they may well have been members of the family of friends of the artist. That the picture was not painted on commission as an informal portrait group is quite certain, for the artist offered it for sale at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists. On the other hand, it would seem to have sold quite promptly, since no other lifetime exhibitions of the work have so far been located; presumably, it entered immediately into a private collection, probably that of the Monks family who lived at 51 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It is surprising that Winter's Tale of Sprites and Goblins did not resurface in Bunker's memorial show, held at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in January of 1891, though the collection shown then consisted primarily of the artist's Impressionist landscapes. This picture was included in the Bunker exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during October, 1943, and again in the Bunker show held at the New Britain Museum of American Art in April, of 1978. It remains the artist's most important figural work.We are grateful to Dr. William H. Gerdts for writing this essay.
