DENNIS MILLER BUNKER 1861-1890 THE STATION Measurements: 14.25in. by 18.25in. Alternate Measurements: (36.2 by 46.4 cm) signed To Tarbell/D.M. Bunker, l.r. oil on canvas Painted circa 1886-89. Provenance: Edmund C. Tarbell (gift from the artist) Mary Tarbell Schaffer (his daughter), New Castle, New Hampshire Giovanni Castano, Boston, Massachusetts (acquired from the above) Ira Spanierman, New York Acquired from the above, 1964 Exhibited: New Britain, Connecticut, The New Britain Museum of American Art; New York, Davis & Long Company, Dennis Miller Bunker Rediscovered, April-June 1978, no 14 Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum, American Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings from the Collection of Rita and Daniel Fraad May-July 1985, no. 16, pp. 36-37, illustrated Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts; Denver, Colorado, Denver Art Museum, Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist, January-June 1995, October- December 1995, no. 35, pp. 17, 62, 111, 174, 182, illustrated in color p. 153 Note: The present painting depicts the view from Bunker's studio at 145 Dartmouth Street in Boston. According to Erica E. Hirshler, "In The Station, Bunker looked along the railroad tracks toward the East; the step-gabled silhouetter of the Y.M.C.A. at Berkeley and Boylston streets, the steeple of the Arlington Street Church, and the dome of the State House appear on the horizon. 'Bunker allowed the tracks, railroad cars, and train sheds to dominate the composition. The natural world is limited to the gray sky, linked by a plume of steam to the white snow, which Bunker used as flickering highlight to define architectural details. It is a startlingly modern painting, more akin to the grimy visions of industrial landscapes created in the early twentieth century than it is to the common and persistent nineteenth-century American vision of the railroad as a harbinger of progress in the wilderness. With its free handling of paint and city subject matter, The Station recalls Monet's steaming locomotives at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, exhibited at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. It is unlikely that Bunker saw that series, but his new familiarity with Impressionism must have contributed to the confident ease with which he painted his only known urban view" (Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist, Boston, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 62).