Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny
- Date of birth
- 1864
- Date of death
- 1947
- Notes
- Rupert C. W. Bunny was born in St Kilda, Melbourne in 1864, and was schooled in Hobart. After abortive studies in civil engineering and architecture, at the beginning of the 1880s he settled on art school in Melbourne, taking design under Oswald R. Campbell, and painting under Folingsby. Bunny came to England in 1884, and spent 18 months at Calderon's Art School in London. Among the students he met there were Henry Tuke and T. C. Gotch, who persuaded him to go to Paris to the atelier of Jean Paul Laurens. Thereafter, although he sent pictures to the Royal Academy from 1892, he settled in France, marrying a French girl in 1902, and achieving a measure of official recognition there. He made a return visit to Australia in 1911, and in the 1920s made further and longer visits, exhibiting in Melbourne and Sydney. In 1933, when his French wife died, he finally returned permanently to Australia, settling in South Yarra, Melbourne. Oddly, despite his strong reputation in Europe, during his life he seems to have been somewhat neglected by the art establishment in Australia, though just before his death his reputation increased and most of his works have ended up in Australian art galleries. Bunny's work was influenced by his French master, Laurens, but also by Puvis de Chavannes and by the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. His favourite subject was girls, typically in threes, sleeping, sunning themselves, in modern society, or in mythological and biblical settings. Some of his paintings are excellently symbolist, as in his striking Annunciation, Salome, The Forerunners and Descending Angels. Bunny died in Melbourne in 1947.
