Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny (29 September 1864 – 25 May 1947)
was an Australian painter, born in St Kilda, Victoria. He achieved success
and critical acclaim as an expatriate in fin-de-si�cle 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 Mus�e 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.”
Bunny was the third son of a Victorian Country Court judge, Brice Frederick
Bunny, and Marie Hedwig Dorothea Wulsten. He travelled to England in 1884
and studied at Calderon's art school in London. After 18 months he went to
Paris to study at the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens.
Between 1893 and 1907, he was a frequent visitor to the �taples art
colony and has left some memorable paintings, among them the atmospheric
Light on the Canche and Rainy Weather at �taples, now
in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Both these date from 1902, the
year he married Jeanne Heloise Morel, a former art student and model,
who appeared frequently in his paintings. Bunny continued to live in
France until 1911, when he returned to Australia for a visit. For a
number of years afterwards he travelled back and forth between Australia
and France. After his wife died in 1933, he returned permanently to
Australia and settled in South Yarra, Victoria.