Dennis Miller Bunker was born in Brooklyn in 1861 to a long line of Nantucket Quakers. His family’s lineage in New England drew the family to the region during many boyhood trips. As early as age 17 he was taking classes under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League, as well as studying at the National Academy of Design. Having exhausted the educational offerings of New York, he set off for Paris in 1884, studying there under Hebert and Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  By 1885 he had returned to the United States, settling in Boston, where he took a position teaching drawing at Cowles Art School. He wrote frequently of his homesickness for New York, but nonetheless was remembered quickly after his death and forevermore as a Bostonian at heart.  He spent the summer of 1886 with Abbott Thayer, whom he idolized, and that of 1888 with John Singer Sargent, with whom he became good friends. It was through this friendship that Bunker, five years’ Sargent’s junior, met Isabella Stewart Gardner.  She would remain his most important patron.  The years of 1887 to 1889 were his busiest, executing portraits of the Gardner family as well as canvases of Samuel Morse and Mr. & Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears.  He had finally established himself both socially and financially. His death the following year, of spinal meningitis, cut tragically short an impressive and celebrated career. Sargent called him the most gifted painter he knew, and his canvases that survive are testament to a virtuosic talent well beyond his years.