Rupert BUNNY

Australian 1864–1947
worked throughout Europe 1888–1933

Rupert Bunny travelled to Europe at the age of twenty and became one of the most successful of all Australian artists living abroad. His work was included in the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, and the Paris Salon, where they were reproduced and received critical attention and acclaim. Like fellow expatriate Australians, Bunny’s student life and subsequent successes were reported in the local newspapers and encouraged other aspiring artists to follow in his footsteps.

Water became a favourite motif for Bunny throughout his career and many of his early major paintings involved mythological sea creatures. Mermaids dancing, 1896, with its sprawling sea-nymphs and deep blue palette, shares striking similarities to the dramatic compositions of the German artist Arnold Böcklin, who gained prominence during the 1880s for images of centaurs, Nereids, nymphs and Tritons participating in extravagant and ritualistic scenes. Like contemporary synchronised swimmers, Bunny’s mermaids perform complex aquatic manoeuvres, while three female and one male colleague rest on adjoining rocks, chanting and drinking from a conch shell. The subdued colour is broken only by touches of vivid orange seaweed and kelp which reinforces the overall sense of mystery and unease:

Mr Bunny has a powerful and original imagination and a bizarre fancy. He loves to paint mer-folk, nymphs, and fairies, and to deal with witches and warlocks, and the uncanny little people of legendary lore. He is particularly at home in treating the nude with a marine setting.1

1 R. Jope-Slade, ‘An Australian quartette’, Magazine of Art, London, 1895, p. 392.

Geoffrey Smith

Chattering, c. 1908, belongs to a series of exquisite paintings that Bunny exhibited in London under the title Days and nights in August. The most remarkable of these depict beautiful women, dressed in elegant, flounced skirts and striking tea-gowns, engaged in leisurely pursuits on a balcony, protected from the summer heat. Using the distinctive red and white blind, balcony railing and wooden floorboards, the artist sumptuously captures the patterned effects of light streaming across various surfaces and creates an intimate tableau where the viewer enters the privileged and private domain of his subjects. It is a world permeated by poetry, music, dance, languor, anticipation, gossip and intrigue, and the artist often gave these works titles such as The distant song, The first step, Idleness, Waiting, Who comes?, or Caught out.

Bunny’s principal model—he sometimes used her for more than one figure in a composition—was Jeanne Morel, who he married in 1902. Her natural beauty and poise, inspired the artist to create sumptuous and sensual images that typified the elegance of the Edwardian period, an era that was tragically destroyed by the events of World War I:

It is this gay sunlit world that Rupert Bunny loves to paint as a background to the figures of women. He is above everything a rare colourist, one who loves the splendours of oriental dyes, and the charms of women set in delicacies of lace and fine linen … for the women he paints belong to the world in which he lives. They are neither posed nor self-conscious, and wear pictorially the same natural grace that informs their daily life. Bunny is almost exclusively a painter of women. His sense of their beauty is quickened neither by morbidity nor psychological curiosity; his adoration is frank and clean as the sunlight.1

1 L. Lindsay, ‘Rupert C. W. Bunny’, Art in Australia, Sydney, May 1923, n.p.

Geoffrey Smith