Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny was born in the suburb of St Kilda, Melbourne , in a house called “Eckerberg” after his German mother's home in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. His father was a judge, his mother an accomplished musician. The household was filled with noisy children. A host of visitors came over the swamp from Melbourne for musical evenings, amateur theatricals and select gatherings of novelists, scientists and politicians.

Though Bunny belonged to the first generation of Australian-born artists, and studied at the National Gallery School , Melbourne , with Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin, his “Australianess”, unlike theirs, is not what is remarkable about him. In his own day, his paintings looked foreign. Most of his painting career – from 1886 to 1932 – was spent in Paris , and there were few Australian subjects. But this was not the reason people found the paintings foreign. Their exoticism was observed not only by Australians: Parisian and British audiences noticed the mix of familiar and unfamiliar ingredients in his paintings. Bunny used the fancy-dress of ancient myths and classical literature to tell stories which have equivalents in modern life. On the other hand, even his imagery of modern life in Paris had an air of fantasy. Gustave Geoffrey observed the air of privacy, the “secret charm” of women enacting the pleasant festival of an intensely feminine life, in images of “delicious fantasy”.

Bunny was receptive to the idea of expressing music, literature and dance in painting. An aesthetic synthesis of that sort satisfied everything he believed in, because although he had chosen a career in art he continued to explore his interest in music, classics and the theatre.

Paris where he met and married the artist Jeanne Morel (born 1871, died 1933) and where he lived for forty-six years - between 1886 and 1933 – had a profound influence on him. He absorbed its music, theatre, plastic arts and dance, heard it's intellectual arguments and read its literature. He saw the dancing of Isadora Duncan, Otero, and later, the Ballets Russes; listened to the music of Faure, Satie and Debussy; and read the stories of Guy de Maupassant. Paris at the time of the Belle Epoque gave Bunny his major contemporary theme – the leisured life of women. Between 1906 – 1911 images of women comprised most of his work, but he lamented the passing of this excessively feminine style that ended with the First World War. “When short skirts came in I no longer wanted to paint women” said Bunny.

At the war's end, Bunny emerged from the shadowy life of Paris and made a number of annual winter-spring excursions to the south of France . There he enjoyed the warmth of Provence in winter, and painted landscapes and sketched. They illustrated not winter, but the serene promise of the spring season. These landscapes (painted while the artist was aged in his late fifties and sixties) dwelt comfortingly on natural sequences of light, weather and season.

When Bunny painted at Tintaldra on the upper Murray in 1926, the critics were muted in their comments. It was felt that Australians, “accustomed to a brush stroke doing its work in a definite fashion” would be “uncertain about the handling” in these works of Bunny, with “the character of the gum tree hardly well enough expressed”. (Note II)

In fact, the style and imagery of the Tintaldra paintings accorded with a change in Australian landscape painting towards a bony interpretation of dry, blonde colours, as in Hans Heysen's Flinders Ranges paintings and the 1920's landscapes of Elioth Gruner and Arthur Streeton.

Bunny's reputation in Australia fluctuated in his lifetime and has continued to be a matter for debate ever since. In the late 1960's Daniel Thomas judged him “a much better painter” (Note III) than his contemporaries Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. James Gleeson thought his paintings “of such quality that they transcend the limitations of their period”(Note IV). Twenty years later, historian Humphrey McQueen disagreed “He was the complete cosmopolitan – at home nowhere”(Note V). But at the same time, art critic John McDonald noticed “a refreshing willingness to keep reinventing himself which distinguished him from most of the artists of the ‘Golden Summer' (Australian) impressionism exhibition”(Note VI).

What is clear is that Bunny had an astonishing ease in the use of different styles and inventiveness in image making. In this respect he was a truly modern artist.

Reproduced in part from “Rupert Bunny: An Australian in Paris ” catalogue published by the National Gallery of Australia , Canberra , 1991; written by Mary Eagle

Note II:   “Argus” Melbourne 2 March, 1927 .

Note III:   “Sunday Telegraph” Sydney 18 August, 1968 .

Note IV:   “Sun Herald” Sydney 14 September, 1969 .

Note V:   “Time Australia ” Melbourne 8 September, 1986 .

Note VI:   “National Times” Sydney 11 July 1986 .