Wild Asters

Dennis Miller Bunker was among the most promising American Impressionists before his early death in 1890 at twenty-nine. 'Wild Asters' (1889) belongs to his Calcasieu paintings — works produced at the Massachusetts home of Isabella Stewart Gardner, where he spent summers in the late 1880s under the influence of Sargent's example and his own investigation of Monet's methods. His flower garden paintings — loose, free, saturated with color — were considered radical by American standards and influenced a generation of subsequent painters.

Bunker's aster painting shows the full influence of Monet's flower subjects — the blossoms rendered through broken color and free brushwork that captures the visual sensation of massed flowers in outdoor light without botanical precision. His palette is high-keyed and saturated, the colors allowed to interact freely through the varied brushwork. The composition's looseness gives the work an immediacy that distinguished it sharply from the tight botanical studies of academic flower painting.