Rupert Bunny was Australia’s most internationally successful artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bunny had moved from London to Paris to be at the epicenter of the art world. He was studying in Paris , where he shared a studio with his lover, the English artist Alastair Cary-Elwes. Their close friend, Hungarian author Zsigmond Justh, wrote of Bunny and Cary-Elwes as a couple in his diary in 1888 and of Cary-Elwes as the dominant partner. Both were socially gregarious, attending literary and artistic salons, cafes, the theatre and concerts, and Justh described the physically fit Bunny at an artists’ ball ‘dressed as an angel, wearing a white, semi-transparent, floor-length shirt … he looked splendid’. The dashing couple would vacation on the beaches in Brittany until Cary-Elwes would return to London in 1895 and entered a monastery in 1896. Bunny would marry a fellow art student in 1902, spending much of the rest of his life and career in France. The Reverend Luke (Alastair George Frances) Cary-Elwe died at age 80 in 1946.