Podcast appearances and mentions of rupert bunny

'Summer time' magnificently demonstrates Rupert Bunny’s skill as a draughtsman and his masterful handling of large-scale composition. Exhibited at the New Salon in 1907, the painting epitomises the leisured spirit of the ‘Belle Époque’, elegantly capturing seven voluptuous women lounging inside a bathhouse, sipping iced tea and inhaling the intoxicating scent of freshly plucked roses. Bunny modelled each of the figures on his wife Jeanne Morel, who sat for numerous paintings from this period.

Rupert Bunny (Australia 1864–1947), Who comes? c. 1908. Oil on canvas, 81.0 x 54.2 cm. John B. Pye Bequest 1963.

Salon painting as a precept and as a practice had no more loyal adherent than Rupert Bunny. Born and educated in Melbourne, Bunny began a lifetime of European travel and residence in 1884. The success of his academic and essentially escapist project in Paris and London was real, complicit though it proved to be with the self-delusion of an age on the edge of war. Bunny's dedication to the good life resulted in some of the most sumptuous paintings in Australian art history, and the most admired. The artist's wife, kittenish herself, plays with a lapful of cats. Her companion accepts a basin of milk from a meaningfully shadowed maid. As upholstered in privilege as they are in their lacy day-gowns, Bunny's women are the late-picked fruit of a century whose heyday had passed. Despite his stylistic conservatism, the painter kept a finger on the pulse of taste. He responded to post-impressionism and fauvism, albeit belatedly, in a series of brilliantly coloured compositions on classical themes in the 1920s. During that decade, Bunny returned twice to Australia, settling permanently in 1933. Music, in which he had always had a parallel interest, became increasingly important to him: even so palpable a painting as A summer morning, with its plump depictions of fabric and flesh, has a musical ethereality. Art Gallery Handbook 1999

In this dreamy scene three elaborately gowned women with accessories of roses and richly coloured shawls and fans, pose together on a balcony. Nocturne is one of a series of night balcony scenes that Bunny painted which evoke a mood of intimacy and luxurious leisure, of perfume, poetry and distant music. Though ostensibly intimate, the scenario is theatrical.

Nellie Melba was the professional name of Helen Porter Mitchell (1861–1931). The Australian soprano was born in Melbourne, the city from which she took her name. She sang at Covent Garden, London, from 1888 to 1926, and at intervals with the Metropolitan Opera Company, New York. Famous for her lyric and coloratura roles, Sarah Bernhardt described her voice as being ‘pure crystal’ and Percy Grainger claimed that her voice always made him ‘mindsee Australia’s landscapes’. When Bunny painted this portrait, Melba was at the pinnacle of her success and beginning her artistic partnership with the tenor, Enrico Caruso.

Throughout the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th, artists used mythological and allegorical themes as well as classical forms to elevate their subjects. In An idyll Bunny conveyed the universal and ageless theme of love with two lovers asleep, watched over by Cupid. First exhibited as L’Age d’Or, the image conveys a dream of a golden time, of Olympian gods and goddesses, of Adam and Eve before the Fall and of eternal man and woman.