Isabella Stewart Gardner

Dennis Miller Bunker's portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888) depicts his important patron — the Boston socialite and art collector who would eventually establish the Gardner Museum — in the drawing room setting she inhabited so deliberately as a performance of aesthetic cultivation. Gardner was one of the most important American art patrons of her era, collecting Old Masters with Bernard Berenson's guidance and supporting younger American artists including Sargent and Bunker himself. The portrait records both an individual and the culture of aesthetic patronage that shaped American art collecting in the Gilded Age.

Bunker places Gardner within the richly decorated interior she inhabited, the background a study in the aesthetic environment she created around herself. His portraiture shows Sargent's influence in its directness and painterly confidence — a portrait painter in full command of his means. The figure is rendered with psychological presence and the quality of social performance that Gardner consciously projected.