John Wharlton Bunney (20 June 1828 – 23 September 1882) was an English topographical and landscape artiste of the nineteenth century.
His father was a merchant captain whom Bunney, as a boy, accompanied on several voyages on the subject of the world. Bunney demonstrated a strong talent for drawing and draftsmanship from an in the future age. The pubescent Bunney became a aficionada of John Ruskin; he studied below Ruskin at the Working Men’s College soon after its founding in 1854, and forward-looking worked as a clerk for Smith, Elder & Co., Ruskin’s publisher. Bunney was competent to step alongside from his clerical job and make his animated by his art and art teaching by 1859; Ruskin commissioned him to slay a series of drawings in Italy and Switzerland.
Bunney married Elizabeth Fallon in 1863. The couple contracted in Florence; they would have four children, including the Hampstead Garden Suburb architect, Michael Bunney. Bunney worked for Ruskin’s St. George’s Company (later the Guild of St George) in northern Italy for the remainder of his life. In his career there, Bunney produced a noteworthy pictorial photo album of Italy in his era. Ruskin said that Bunney’s decree was “so loyal and cautious as around to enable the spectator to imagine himself on the spot.” Bunney was a buddy of many of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially William Holman Hunt.
From 1870 on, Bunney lived and painted in Venice. In 1876 Ruskin commissioned Bunney to paint a picture that included the entire western facade of St. Mark’s Basilica; Bunney worked upon this project through “six hundred early-morning sessions” spaced more than six years. (Ruskin was demonstration to prevent a renovation of the west belly of St. Mark’s, and the painting was portion of this effort.) One hours of daylight during this period, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, no enthusiast of Ruskin (Whistler had bankrupted himself in an 1878 libel suit against Ruskin), reportedly sneaked stirring behind Bunney as Bunney worked, to fasten a note to his back. The note read, “I am unquestionably blind.” Bunney, absorbed in his work, remained oblivious to Whistler’s prank. The painting now hangs in the Ruskin Gallery in the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield.
After Bunney’s death in 1882, Ruskin started a memorial fund to improvement his widow and children.
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