Eleanor Hardy Bunker

Best known for his impressionist canvases, the French-trained Bunker also excelled as a figure painter and portraitist. This elegant painting of his wife, Eleanor Hardy Bunker, was produced soon after their marriage, just three months before the artist’s premature death from heart failure. Its striking frame design by Bunker’s friend, the architect Stanford White, reveals the collaborative nature of the Aesthetic age, in which painters and designers frequently joined forces in artistic production. Less than a month after Bunker’s death, White, along with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Charles Adams Platt, worked with the Society of American Artists—one of the leading progressive artists’ organizations of the period— to purchase this portrait for the Metropolitan Museum. Three years later, Platt, a widower, married Eleanor Hardy Bunker.