Robert Spear Dunning

Robert Spear Dunning (1829 — 12 August 1905) was an American painter, best known as a painter of bountiful still life paintings. He was a co-founder and leader of the Fall River School, an evening drawing School in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Dunning was born in 1829 in Brunswick, Maine. A few years later, he moved to the wealthy mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts, where he was employed in a cotton mill.

He studied with James Roberts in Thomaston, Maine before moving to New York in 1849, where he focused on figure and portrait painting under Daniel Huntington at the National Academy of Design. 

In 1853, Dunning returned to Fall River, where he spent the rest of his life.

In 1859, he partnered with his artist friend John E. Grouard to form an artist's firm Grouard & Dunning. In 1870, the two co-founded the Fall River Evening Drawing School, where Dunning taught along with artists who had studied with him, including Bryant Chapin, Herbert Fish, and Franklin H. Miller. Because of Dunning's efforts, Fall River became strongly associated with still-life painting during the nineteenth century. One of his students was still-life painter Abbie Luella Zuill, who was called in to complete many of Dunning's unfinished works after his death in 1905.

In his early career, Dunning painted marines, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, but by 1865, he switched to still-life paintings. The style and characteristics of his artwork were isolated from the trends of trompe l'oeil and the use of looser brushwork. Noted American art historian William H. Gerdts and Russell E. Burke described a typical painting by Dunning as:

The fruit is lusciously rendered, with a convincing suggestion of textures…and the tabletop support is always highly polished to reflect the multitude of objects upon it. The edge of the tabletop is almost parallel to the picture plane and is almost always elaborately carved.

Dunning exhibited at the National Academy of Design (1850, 1851, and 1880), the American Art-Union (1850), the Boston Art Club (1880), and the Providence Art Club. His works are in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, the Fall River Historical Society, the Fall River Public Library, and the Swansea, MA Town Hall.