Part of the The Richmond School of Indiana painters and Richmond's premier artist, John Elwood Bundy was born in Guilford County, North Carolina and was raised on a farm in Morgan County, Indiana near Monrovia. He attended Quaker schools and married Mary Marlatt in 1875. He spent nearly a decade in New York City as a portraitist and was also a photographer, but he decided to focus on landscape painting.

Bundy worked in both oil and watercolor, and much of his subject matter came from Wayne County, Indiana, especially the Whitewater Valley. In 1888, he moved to Richmond and for eight years headed the Art Department at Earlham College where he taught drawing and painting. During that time, a book of his etchings, "Fond Recollections" was published and reflected his love of the scenery around Earlham. After the death of his wife in 1906, he built a studio behind the family home in Monrovia and lived with his sister.

From 1910 to 1911, he traveled in California and then spent several summers in Northern Michigan, on Little Traverse Bay, where he painted primarily in watercolor. By the early 1920s, he was sharing his home and studio with Elwood Morris, a Richmond painter, and his wife. He exhibited widely across the United States including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Pennsylvania Academy in 1904, the National Academy of Design in 1911 and 1916, the Chicago Art Institute in 1903 and 1907-1914, the Hoosier Salon in 1925, and the 1902 Society of Western Artists. His primary dealer was J.W. Young of Chicago. In 1929, Bundy, who was getting quite frail, moved to Harlingen, Texas with his son, but died in a sanatorium in Cincinnati on January 17, 1933.

Source: "American Art Review," 8/2002. 'The Art of John Elwood Bundy,' by William H. Gerdts.