William Gedney Bunce

William Gedney Bunce was born on 19 September 1840 in Hartford, Connecticut, the first-born child of Elizabeth Huntington Chester (1807-1861), who was the second wife of James Marvin Bunce (1806-1859), who had three children by his first wife, Frances Ann Brace (1808-1838) and six children by Elizabeth Chester. William Bunce enlisted in the First Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer cavalry, 17 October 1861, and was made a second lieutenant and later a regimental quartermaster.

After two years in the army, Bunce became a student at Cooper Union, New York. He also studied with the New York painter William Hart, and later in Munich, Germany and in Brussels, Belgium. Bunce painted in Venice and had a studio in Paris, where he painted "A Venice Night" which was hung in the Paris Salon in 1876. He received the bronze medal at the Paris Exposition in 1900, and silver medals at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo in 1901, the Charleston Exposition in 1902 and the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. At the time of his death in 1916, the Metropolitan Museum in New York owned "Early Morning in Venice" and "Morning View in Venice," and "Sunset, San Giorgio, Venice," hung in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. While living in Europe, Bunce became friends with the American artists Charles Noel Flagg and Augustus St. Gaudens. Bunce was a member of the National Academy of Design and the Tile Club of New York. He never married and for many years spent part of the year with his sister Ellen Bunce (Mrs. Archibald A. Welch) of Woodland Street, Hartford, and part of the year in Venice. William Gedney Bunce was struck by a car at the intersection of Woodland Street and Asylum Avenue on Sunday evening, 5 November 1916, and he died an hour later at St. Francis Hospital. He was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.