Sleuths on the hunt for elusive artistic treasures of Rupert Bunny

Renewed interest in Australian artist Rupert Bunny has led to fresh discoveries of his work and letters.

Detail from Last Fine Days, Royan (c. 1908) by Rupert Bunny. Picture: The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonne

Much new light has been thrown on the life and art of Rupert Bunny through the recent discovery of many personal and family letters relating to his youthful days in Melbourne and early years in Paris. They dispel a long-held erroneous belief that his father was against Bunny studying art.

Not only do they highlight the initial financial support given by his father in Melbourne and later in England but also reveal his parents’ considerable pride in his achievements. On his father’s death in 1884, his widowed mother, despite her straitened circumstances, gave him all the financial assistance she could.

There is also abundant evidence of the close friendship between Bunny’s father and Alfred Felton, future benefactor of the National Gallery of Victoria. The family tradition of Felton’s influence, support and later patronage of the young artist in Paris is confirmed. We also learn that Bunny began his studies in Paris earlier than previously thought.

Further letters, found in the Hungarian National Szechenyi Library, Budapest, tell us of Bunny’s friendships, activities, interests and hopes in France and Hungary during the late 1880s and 90s. Add to this many previously unknown works from international as well as Australian collections and we have a far better picture of the artist and record of his art.

Bunny’s output was prodigious. Several thousand oil paintings, oil sketches, monotypes, drawings and watercolours are known. While some have eluded all efforts to trace them, many “new” works came to my attention even during the final days of writing the catalogue raisonne. These included paintings in Britain, France, Budapest and South America. Unfortunately those acquired by Russian collectors before the revolution remain untraced.

My interest in Bunny was initiated by Lucy Swanton, one of the marvellous former directors of the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. It was 1967 and Lucy was visiting Newcastle, where I was then director of the art gallery. We were standing beside Bunny’s painting Last Fine Days, Royan, our conversation being his present neglect as an artist. We agreed that something should be done to get his achievements better known.

Lucy made an offer that could not be refused. If I would arrange an exhibition of his work for the Newcastle Art Gallery, she would assist with advice on where the best were and encourage private collectors to lend their treasures. That was the beginning of an association that developed over the years to become an enriching part of my life.

In the late 1960s you could buy a Bunny painting for a few hundred dollars. When Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald became interested, Bunny’s paintings “soared” to more than $2000 each! If money is any indication of fame, then Bunny’s was on the way up again. In 1988 he became the first Australian artist to break the $1 million auction mark when Un Nuit de Canicule sold at Joel’s in Melbourne for $1,250,000. (The painting has since been destroyed by fire.)

The Bunny retrospective exhibition held at the Newcastle gallery 20 years before was modest in size and catalogue, in keeping with the then resources of a municipal gallery and professional staff of two.

One of the unexpected outcomes was the commissioning of a book on Bunny by Lansdowne Press of Melbourne. For the next year, my only spare time was when I slept. The book, when published, included a catalogue of Bunny’s works as then known, together with their likely dates.

As Bunny seldom dated his paintings, the task of placing them in a reasonable chronological order required considerable effort in stylistic analysis, use of international exhibition records, sketchbooks, letters and any publi­cations that might throw better light on what he was doing at the time.

The generous response to the book led other Bunny collectors to contact me so their works could be added to the record. This continued over many years, with dealers, galleries and auction houses seeking advice on Bunny paintings, monotypes or other works that had recently come to light.

The result was the accumulation of a large amount of additional material, which needed much sorting and cataloguing to be accessible.

This grew to many volumes of manuscript notes and illustrations, the Bunny archive enriched by letters and memories from the wider Bunny family and collectors who are no longer with us. As the material grew, I realised it was my responsibility to record what I knew so that collectors, scholars, curators and lovers of Bunny’s art could share in this knowledge.

When the Art Gallery of NSW embarked on a new retrospective exhibition of Bunny’s work, new fields of discovery opened up, especially in Budapest and Paris. It not only endorsed the international esteem in which Bunny was held but confirmed that he was Australia’s most internationally acclaimed artist of his time. The exhibition, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, opened at the AGNSW in November 2009, before travelling to Melbourne and Adelaide during 2010.

The renewed interest in Bunny once again resulted in more of his work becoming known and led to enriching contacts with later generations of the wider Bunny family. The exhibition was distin­guished by aesthetic excellence and generosity of scholarship. I hope that something of both has flowed on into this book.

Edited extract from The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonne by David Thomas (Thames & Hudson, two volumes in a slipcase, $175).