William Herbert "Buck" Dunton
Today it is our last Sunday with the Denver Art Museum collection. We hope you enjoyed the selection of masterpieces as much as we did! :)
William Herbert "Buck" Dunton (1878–1936) was an American writer, illustrator, and painter who became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. Best known for his depictions of cowboys and the American Southwest, he also had a lifelong fascination with black bears.
In this work, Dunton depicts a mother bear and her cubs ambling through a densely forested landscape. Theatrical lighting dramatically illuminates the forest and trees whose undulating lines echo the soft, rounded forms of the bears. Such stylistic features point to the influence of Art Nouveau, whose practitioners turned to nature for inspiration and abstracted its forms into decorative patterns for aesthetic effect.
P.S. Want to see how painters depicted the beauty of American landscape? Here are American national parks in art. <3