Venice

Andrew Fisher Bunner’s early works were modeled after those by the Hudson River School.

A.F. Bunner, On the River.

The Hudson River School paintings “combined meticulous, factual description with romantic feeling for the beauty, grandeur, and nobility of American scenery”[1]. The typical paintings of the Hudson River School were landscapes of “undefiled scenery of the northeastern United States”[2] especially of New York State, where the Hudson River is located.

If we look at A.F. Bunner’s On the River, we can see the influence of the Hudson River School. The painting is of an undisclosed location, but is more than likely a scene

Thomas Doughty, In the Catskills, 1836, Oil on Canvas, Addison Gallery of American Art.

in the Catskills or Adirondack Mountains. The work is clam and peaceful with someone lazily rowing on the lake. The work is the celebration of the American landscape and how our landscape is vastly different from Europe. If you compare Bunner’s On the River with Thomas Doughty, 1793-1856[3], In The Catskills you can see how Bunner uses the Hudson River School’s use of grand and unaltered landscapes, smoky mountains in the distance, and the picture containing one person or suggestion of a person.

Andrew Fisher Bunner’s later works would expand on his early influence of the Hudson River School and his time in Europe and Venice. His later works were of marine landscapes and he frequented the East

A.F. Bunner, The Wreck.

Hamptons, a popular artist colony at the end of the 19^th century[4]. As we seen in his work The Wreck, the painting is the love of the sea he must have developed from his time in Venice as well as the ideas of the vast landscape that is present in the Hudson River School works. Andrew Fisher Bunner’s early works would shape his Venice works and his Venice works

would shape his later works.