A Summer Morning By Rupert Bunny, Art Gallery Of New South Wales Postcard

Salon painting as a precept and as a practice had no more loyal adherent than Rupert Bunny. Born and educated in Melbourne, Bunny began a lifetime of European travel and residence in 1884. The success of his academic and essentially escapist project in Paris and London was real, complicit though it proved to be with the self-delusion of an age on the edge of war. Bunny's dedication to the good life resulted in some of the most sumptuous paintings in Australian art history, and the most admired. The artist's wife, kittenish herself, plays with a lapful of cats. Her companion accepts a basin of milk from a meaningfully shadowed maid. As upholstered in privilege as they are in their lacy day-gowns, Bunny's women are the late-picked fruit of a century whose heyday had passed. 'A Summer Morning', with its plump depictions of fabric and flesh, is also titled 'Matinée d'été Aprés la sieste.' It is currently at Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Rupert Bunny Australia, France (1864-1947) was one of the most successful Australian expatriate artists of his generation. In an era when artists were increasingly drawn to the vibrant cultural atmosphere of Europe, no other Australian achieved the accolades Bunny accumulated in Paris in the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1895, Bunny met his future wife Jeanne Morel while she was a fellow art student. She became the subject of many paintings, which from around this time increasingly depicted groupings of languid, dreamy female figures. Such works suggest the influence of the British pre-Raphaelite painters particularly the idealised, angelic women of John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At the turn of the century, a new mood pervaded Bunny’s art, which no doubt was due to growing financial and critical success. His paintings retained the idealism and grand, decorative scale befitting the Salon, but he was influenced by a more wide-ranging interest in the representation of modern life. Bunny’s depictions of his wife Jeanne and her friends typified the elegance, fashionable frills and glamour of the seemingly endless summer that was the belle époque.

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