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Title

A summer morning

(circa 1908)

Artist

Rupert Bunny

Australia, France

29 Sep 1864 – 25 May 1947

Artist profile

Alternate image of A summer morning by Rupert Bunny
Alternate image of A summer morning by Rupert Bunny
Alternate image of A summer morning by Rupert Bunny

  • Details

    Other Titles
    Matinée d'été
    Aprés la sieste
    Place where the work was made
    Paris → France
    Date
    (circa 1908)
    Media category
    Painting
    Materials used
    oil on canvas
    Dimensions
    222.0 x 181.5 cm stretcher; 246.3 x 205.7 x 13.0 cm frame
    Signature & date

    Signed l.r. corner, brown oil "Rupert C W Bunny". Not dated.

    Credit
    Purchased 1911
    Location
    South Building, ground level, Grand Courts
    Accession number
    666
    Copyright

    Reproduction requests

    Artist information
    Rupert Bunny

    Artist profile

    Works in the collection

    52

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  • About

    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.

    Despite his stylistic conservatism, the painter kept a finger on the pulse of taste. He responded to post-impressionism and fauvism, albeit belatedly, in a series of brilliantly coloured compositions on classical themes in the 1920s. During that decade, Bunny returned twice to Australia, settling permanently in 1933. Music, in which he had always had a parallel interest, became increasingly important to him: even so palpable a painting as 'A summer morning', with its plump depictions of fabric and flesh, has a musical ethereality.

  • Places

    Where the work was made

    Paris

  • Exhibition history

    Shown in 5 exhibitions

  • Bibliography

    Referenced in 18 publications

Other works by Rupert Bunny

See all 52 works