Endormies, Rupert Bunny from the old master collection

Endormies, Rupert Bunny (1904)

The model for the sleeping figure in this painting is Bunny’s wife, Jeanne. They had met in 1895 and married in 1902. She would become his principal model, her graceful form and sensuous features repeated in numerous works and embodying Bunny’s feminine ideal. From the turn of the century Bunny increasingly depicted groups of female figures, often shown relaxing, dreaming, dressing or undressing by expanses of water. In this work Bunny has included a red rose, traditionally a symbol of love and sensuous power, as well as a white swan, symbolic of grace and beauty and a recurring motif of Belle Époque culture. The small dog is often used by artists to symbolise marital fidelity.

Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny was an Australian painter. Born and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, he achieved success and critical acclaim as an expatriate in fin-de-siècle Paris. He gained an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1890 with his painting Tritons and a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 with his Burial of St Catherine of Alexandria. The French state acquired 13 of his works for the Musée du Luxembourg and regional collections. He was a "sumptuous colourist and splendidly erudite painter of ideal themes, and the creator of the most ambitious Salon paintings produced by an Australian."