Rupert Bunny

Rupert Bunny (1864—1947) spent both his early life and final years in Melbourne. For the most part, however, he was an Australian living and working in Paris, and occasionally in London. Although he had a French wife and was offered French citizenship, Bunny retained a strong sense of his Australianness and never broke the links with his land of birth. For all that, 'Australianness' — the blue and golden of summer or the ubiquitous gum tree — is not what is represented in his art. Yet his paintings are not quite French either.

Bunny grew up by Port Phillip Bay, in the bayside suburb of St Kilda. When he left Australia with his father for an extended period overseas, he was nineteen years old. He had already spent more than two years in England and Europe with his family, and there attended various schools. Such a cosmopolitan childhood meant that he had little difficulty adjusting to life in Europe, and he did not return to live permanently in Melbourne until 1932.

Few paintings have survived from Bunny's early training in Australia at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, where he worked alongside the artists Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin. Indeed, the earliest painting in this exhibition was completed in 1887, while Bunny was a student with Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris. Its neo-classical subject-matter — the sibyls or sorceresses, fauns, mermaids and mermen — owes something to the method of instruction of his French master, Laurens, whose students developed subjects from narratives, particularly mythological stories, and looked to history paintings.

Until the close of the century, Bunny seemed to paint mainly images of a golden age, pastoral scenes which reflected an idyllic existence already vanished from industrialized Europe. Among these paintings are A sea idyll (c.1890) and Pastoral (c. 1893), in which the figures seem to beckon us into a world of past pleasures and musical fantasies.

The grace and eloquence of 'la belle epoque' and the Edwardian period, marriage, and a honeymoon at Etaples in Brittany on the north coast of France in 1902 presented Bunny with new images to work with, and from 1895 to 1913 his wife Jeanne Morel was the model for many of his paintings, including Returning from the garden (c.1906), A summer morning (c.1908) and Who comes? (c.1908). Scenes at Etaples, and later at Royan and other villages on the French coast, became the subject of a large number of paintings: The Canche at Etaples (c. 1902), probably painted during his honeymoon, Shrimp fishers (c. 1910) and Women and child by the sea (1913—18). Bunny returned to these still-popular resorts on many occasions. Occasionally this makes it difficult to determine exactly when some of the paintings were completed, (For example, The bridge at Etaples is attributed to 1902 or 1907.)

At the same time, Bunny completed a series of paintings in which groups of women were formally arranged on balconies and in the Luxembourg Gardens, appearing very chic and very Parisian. The distant song (c. 1908), Nocturne (c,1908) and Caught out (c. 1908) were among a group of paintings which Bunny exhibited under the title 'Days and Nights in August'. These scenes convey a sense of the steamy, perfumed nights of summer and the floating sounds which travel through hot, still air.

In 1912-13, more than twenty years after the first of his summer visits to the north of France, Bunny decided to spend winter in the south, in Provence. Through the 1920s these winter trips to the warm south were quite regular, and from this time his palette acquired a chalky light, seemingly attributable to the Provençal landscape.

There was an apparently sudden change in Bunny's art around 1913. Although he continued to draw on mythological stories for his subjects, their depiction seemed to have little in common with the earlier myths. Now Bunny painted the explosive and tormented moments of the stories in The Rape of Persephone (c.1913), Echo and Narcissus (c.1914—19), and Peleus and Thetis (c.1919—20). Against the drama of the figures, Bunny placed rich, luminous colours, evoking the urgency and frenzy of the narrative. Further, he reduced the space in which these figures stood by flattening out the distance and avoiding suggestions of receding space. These paintings are particularly energetic in the way in which colour, setting up its own rhythm, sweeps across the canvas. Bunny's brushstrokes can also be seen in the monotypes – prints in which a fast-painted image under pressure to a sheet of paper. Because only one impression can be made from each image, the print is known as a monotype. As the monotype is taken from a painted image, spontaneous brushstrokes register in the print. Indeed, brushwork often seems particularly vigorous in the early monotypes, such as Prometheus (1898), which a more controlled pattern of smaller strokes is seen in the post-war monotypes like Wrestling (1921).

Around 1914 Bunny entered four sketches in a competition for the decoration of the new Australia House in London. Other Australian artists, including Arthur Streeton, Sidney Long and George Lambert, also painted sketches for consideration. For his themes, Bunny selected activities which he believed contributed to the colonization and development of Australia-Goldmining, Harvesting, Shearing and Fishing. He was bitterly disappointed when the competition was postponed, for he said that his great, continuing ambition was to 'paint big decorative things like murals for public places. Bunny returned to Australia only three times during the forty-eight years he lived in Europe. His first trip was in 1911, the next in 1926 and the third in 1928. The first visit lasted for seven months and Bunny was very successful in selling many of his paintings. However, apart from portraits, the trip did not appear to provide any other subjects to interest the artist. In this respect, his second trip was more fruitful professionally, as he painted more than nineteen oil sketches around Tintaldra, on the Upper Murray in New South Wales. In 1928 Bunny was in Melbourne and Sydney for six months, during which time he arranged large exhibitions of work which he had brought with him.

Comparisons between the 1926 Australian landscapes and the south of France landscapes completed in the 1920s are inevitable. What we notice is their common ground, both in the structuring of the scenes into planes and in an emphasis on isolated forms, such as the banks of trees in Cultivated land, Sanary (c,1925) and Tintaldra (1926). While such comparisons now seem to enhance our perceptions of Bunny's landscapes, at the time of their painting and first exhibition in Australia, neither his Australian nor his French landscapes were appreciated. The south of France landscapes seemed too modern, while the scenes of the Upper Murray did not match the 1920s notion of an Australian landscape with gum trees and blue skies. 'Nobody likes my Australian picture', Bunny said, 'but I do'.

Nineteenth and twentieth-century painters and writers were drawn to North Africa by exotic and apparently romantic types scenes or by the sinister aspects of African life which they discovered there. Fortune-telling (c. 1913), Youth and maiden (c. 1921) and Slave women (c. 1926) are among a small number of paintings by Bunny which seem to be inspired by such experiences. However, unlike the artists Delacroix, Renoir or Matisse, or the writers Lord Byron, Flaubert or Gide, Bunny's inspiration was not gained at first hand; it reflected an orientalism acquired from sources that included paintings by other artists, exotic designs for the Russian Ballet — such as those of Léon Bakst — and the Bible.

Throughout his long career, Bunny continued to paint portraits of the famous and the well-to-do, such as Madame Nellie Melba (1902) and Madge Currie (1911). When sales were rather slow, it was his portrait commissions which provided a more reliable income.

The last paintings on which Bunny worked are lyrical and delicate reflections of an early vigour. Returning to Australia in 1932 at the age of sixty-eight, he established himself in a small flat in South Yarra. Among his meagre possessions were the books of myths given to him as a child by his father and his illustrated Bible. However, myths no longer inspired the ageing artist. His first summer back in Australia was spent in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, painting nostalgic images of places in which he recalled his family, his parents and especially his mother. These paintings, Familiar scenes in the Botanic Gardens (1932—33), capture the gardens, the swans and the youthful pranks played in such places.

In 1946, a major retrospective exhibition of Rupert Bunny's painting opened at the National Gallery of Victoria. Such recognition, long overdue, was almost too late, for Bunny died the following year. However, his achievements have been recognized with the passing of time. Explanations for this slow acceptance must lead to the question of why Bunny's painting challenged Australians' expectations of what an Australian artist should paint. In answer, we need to acknowledge that, above all, it was because he lived in Europe for most of his life, an Australian in Paris.