Rupert Bunny: 9 works

'Rupert Bunny, artist, studied architecture and engineering at the University of Melbourne as well as art at the National Gallery School from 1881 to 1884. In 1884 he went to Paris with his father, a judge; he was to remain in France for nearly fifty years, enjoying more success than any other Australian painter in Paris and progressing through successive, distinct artistic styles and subjects.'

'Like many Parisian art students, Bunny fled the city in the summer months for the coastal towns of Brittany, in north-west France, sketching its beaches, villages and menhirs.'

'Rupert Bunny has skilfully created a twilight ambience through delicate colour schemes, where the pale blue, silvery ocean and pink-toned sky are quietly reflected in the flesh tones of the figures.'

'He first moved to Paris in 1886 and made the city his permanent home by the early 1890s. Although he continued to exhibit works in Australia, the people, culture and artistic traditions of Europe informed the subjects of his art for most of his prolific career.'

'The 1893 painting was Bunny's second 'pastoral' -- 'oddly enough named', said the Magazine of Art, 'seeing that it is, above all, a seashore picture of ideal nymphs'.1The 1890 Pastoral had also been a seashore picture. Judging from these paintings, Bunny's conception of a pastoral was an allegory of the sort popularised by the French painter Puvis de Chavannes. Van Gogh wrote about Puvis de Chavannes's seashore picture Pleasant land c.1882, in terms that encompass Bunny's pastoral idea: 'you feel you are witnessing ... a strange and happy encounter between very remote antiquity and naked modernity'.2 The encounter between antiquity and modernity is crucial to the way Bunny's pastorals were conceived and the feelings they evoke.'

'He had an extraordinary ability to assimilate diverse influences -- from masters of the European tradition such as Rubens and Velázquez, to contemporaries like Gauguin and Bonnard -- into an ever-evolving vision. Above all, Bunny was a splendid colourist, from the subdued pastel hues of his early dream-like pastorals to the vibrant Fauve-inspired paintings of the 1920s.'

'Bunny was portraying a luxurious domesticity which, in the fashion terms of the day, was well represented by the tea-gown: 'It gives a man a sort of luxurious feel of being an Oriental Pasha, as he lies in his chair, smoking the ever-present cigarette, to see himself surrounded by graceful houris clad in gauze and gorgeous draperies shimmering'.3Marcel Proust wrote at length on the same theme in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913--27) and, like Bunny, he lamented the passing of this excessively feminine style with the coming of the First World War.'

'Summer time' magnificently demonstrates Rupert Bunny's skill as a draughtsman and his masterful handling of large-scale composition.'

'Born and educated in Melbourne, Bunny began a lifetime of European travel and residence in 1884. The success of his academic and essentially escapist project in Paris and London was real, complicit though it proved to be with the self-delusion of an age on the edge of war.'