Nov 1, 2020
“Medfield is holy ground to me”
Nicolai Cikovsky, Curator of American and British Painting, The National Gallery of Art
Cikovsky wrote these words in a letter accepting the invitation of Medfield’s library trustees to visit Medfield, and to speak about some of his great enthusiasms: 19th Century American landscape painting and George Inness. While Inness was certainly first in bringing the beauty of the Medfield landscape to the attention of the American public, he was soon followed by the equally remarkable Dennis Miller Bunker. These two painters had distinctly different approaches, Inness’ sweeping and pastoral, Bunker’s more immediate and intimate, with both men responding to aspects of the Medfield landscape that we can experience ourselves today. Let’s step back into the past with these artists, and see how accessible that past is to us in 2020.
George Inness (1825-1894) lived in Medfield, on Main Street, and had his painting studio in the barn behind the house. The big window he installed to light this studio is still there. He was deeply engaged in community life, a religious man, and a strong supporter of the Abolitionist cause. In 1862, The New York Evening Post reported that when the quota of ten men was requested of Medfield to send to the war, men were not volunteering with enough speed for Inness. He called a meeting, offering one hundred dollars to the first man who would volunteer. He then “pitched into a lot of rich old fellows on the platform, because they did not offer bounties, whereupon they came down with the funds, and the quota was filled”.
As an adherent of mystical Swedenborgian beliefs, Inness wanted his paintings to carry the viewer into the awareness of God, which he believed to be best embodied by the magnificence of nature. Even so, he was not inclined towards the untamed or imposing drama of the American wilderness as it was being revealed during westward expansion. Rather, an Inness landscape is likely to be what he called “a civilized landscape”, with the benign hand of man visible upon the earth–cleared, sometimes cultivated fields, domestic animals, often a single majestic wine-glass elm standing like a sentinel. It was in this spirit that Inness created one of the most famous American landscape paintings, Peace and Plenty. Painted in 1865, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, Peace and Plenty is a thankful acknowledgement of the end of the war and an allegory about the beauty of peace. In this greatest of Inness’s works we see an expansive view of land that shows evidence of human intervention. The viewer gazes into a deep, broad, and glowing distance. Majestic trees define the middle ground, with sheaves of hay and New England stone walls in the foreground, where men stand and talk. The entire composition is tied together by glimpses of the flat, silvery stream winding through the meadows.
While not much grass is being grown for hay in Medfield today, and most of the elms are gone, the walls, fields, streams and rivers that Inness painted continue to be part of Medfield’s landscape. His paintings were a synthesis of hours spent simply looking at the land, and making sketches. He brought these drawings and mental images back to his studio, and put them together to create his paintings. To get the sensation of an Inness view today, you need only go to the former State Hospital grounds to the parking area near the boat launch, and look out over the river below, or find your way to the conservation land off the old Rt.27, and climb the hill.
Dennis Bunker (1861-1890) arrived as a visitor to Medfield more than twenty years after Inness had moved away. He had come to Boston in 1885, where his closest friend was Charles Martin Loeffler, who later introduced him to Medfield. Bunker was a well-recognized figure in the art world during his short lifetime, and one of America’s earliest Impressionists. In its exhibit “American Impressionism and Realism”, The Metropolitan Museum Catalogue states, “In his brief career, which lasted only a decade, Bunker produced paintings remarkable for their quality…and some of the earliest and most beautiful American Impressionist Landscapes”. These landscapes were painted in Medfield, and some may be seen today at the MFA or the Gardner Museum. In the spirit of Impressionism, they were painted on site, while the light lasted.
Not for Bunker were the wide and distant views so beloved by Inness. In fact, at one point while staying with other artist friends in Cornish, New Hampshire, he wrote, “I don’t want to stay here. It is a country of great big hills and mountains and ravines perfectly impossible to paint”. But, he was absolutely suited in Medfield. In his Medfield paintings, the horizon extends no further than the edge of a field, if it is present at all.
The fields, marshes, and gentle hills of Medfield felt to Bunker like the landscape he had experienced while painting in England with his friend, John Singer Sargent. He wrote of the Charles as it was in Medfield, “It runs through the most lovely great meadows—very properly framed in pine forests—and low familiar looking hills—all very much the reverse of striking or wonderful or marvelous but very quietly winning and all wearing so very well, that I wonder what more one needs in any country.”
With Loeffler, Bunker came to Medfield in 1889. He spent the summer boarding at Alice Sewall’s house on Main Street, Old Tannery Farm. Happily, this was located right next to the little 18th century house which became the subject of Bunker’s “Roadside Cottage”. This dwelling, once known to an older generation in Medfield as “the herdsman’s cottage”, is still there for us to see and appreciate. While in town that summer, Bunker painted more canvasses than ever before. He returned to paint again in 1890. All of the Medfield paintings were done in these two summers. Sadly, by the end of that year he had died, probably of meningitis.
Bunker’s Medfield landscapes feel like a series. They record a single subject, the meadows, over the course of the season, beginning with the rich, bright, early summer greens of “The Brook, Medfield”, and ending with the quieter notes of “Wild Asters”. As the viewer, we are up close enough to see individual blades of grass and flowers.
To step into a Bunker painting today could not be easier. Simply walk into the farther fields behind the Wheelock school, and see those same grasses and pooling water, and, once August has arrived, those tiny wild asters that still appear, although there are not so many now.
Among the many reasons to be grateful for the generous amount of conservation land we enjoy in Medfield is this enormous gift: the opportunity to experience for ourselves the vistas that inspired the genius of Inness and Bunker.