Eleanor Hardy Bunker

Dennis Miller Bunker

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Best known for his impressionist canvases, the French-trained Bunker also excelled as a figure painter and portraitist. This elegant painting of his wife, Eleanor Hardy Bunker, was produced soon after their marriage, just three months before the artist’s premature death from heart failure. Its striking frame design by Bunker’s friend, the architect Stanford White, reveals the collaborative nature of the Aesthetic age, in which painters and designers frequently joined forces in artistic production. Less than a month after Bunker’s death, White, along with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Charles Adams Platt, worked with the Society of American Artists—one of the leading progressive artists’ organizations of the period— to purchase this portrait for the Metropolitan Museum. Three years later, Platt, a widower, married Eleanor Hardy Bunker.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art