Jessica (painting)
Encyclopedia
Dennis Miller Bunker
Dennis Miller Bunker was an American painter and innovator of American Impressionism. His mature works include both brightly colored landscape paintings and dark, finely drawn portraits and figures...
in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...
. It is considered one of Bunker's finest figure paintings, and has been described by art historian Theodore Stebbins
Theodore Stebbins
Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. is an American art historian, museum curator, university professor, and writer.Stebbins is the Curator of American Art at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. For 22 years, from 1977 to 1999, he was the John Moors Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine...
as "among the most evocative" works of its time.
In October of 1889 Bunker took a studio and living quarters at 3 North Washington Square in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, alongside friends and fellow artists Abbott Handerson Thayer
Abbott Handerson Thayer
Abbott Handerson Thayer was an American artist, naturalist and teacher. As a painter of portraits, figures, animals and landscapes, he enjoyed a certain prominence during his lifetime, as indicated by the fact that his paintings are part of the most important U.S. art collections...
, Thomas Dewing
Thomas Dewing
Thomas Wilmer Dewing was an American painter working at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and later settled into a studio in New York City...
, and Charles A. Platt
Charles A. Platt
Charles Adams Platt was a prominent artist, landscape gardener, landscape designer, and architect of the "American Renaissance" movement. His garden designs complemented his domestic architecture.-Early career:...
. Newly married and seeking to establish a reputation as a portrait artist in order to support himself and his bride, Bunker painted Jessica in the spring of 1890 using a hired professional model.
Jessica depicts an elegant and aristocratic looking woman in a black dress. She is painted bust length, life size and in profile, her fair skin and red hair set against a dark background. The painting evidences the influence of the circle of Bunker's intimates, including Thayer and Dewing, for its heightened sense of refinement. At the time of the painting Bunker wrote:
"I've been doing badly all day long— and I thought I was doing uncommonly well— but about four o' clock I scraped everything I had done for the last two days and my canvas is back again where I started it— and I am as blue as indigo."
Bunker died just after Christmas 1890 at the age of 29; in 1891 the painting was given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by a group of his admirers.
Artist and writer R. H. Ives Gammell
R. H. Ives Gammell
Robert Hale Ives Gammell , American muralist, portrait painter, art teacher, and writer on art, was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1893. In 1911, he enrolled in the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...
wrote of the painting: "One of the most beautifully studied heads in American art. The transitions of tone and the minor shifts are stated with great subtlety without losing the larger color relations. At the same time the edges and accents throughout the canvas are given exactly the relative degree of definition perceptible to eyes focused so as to take in the entire area depicted. In the painting itself the young woman appears to exist in space, surrounded by atmosphere and light and shadow. Yet the draftsmanship is so sure that we never lose our sense of the form in all its inherent loveliness. The combination of qualities has only rarely been attained in the painting of a head."